AOL is worthless.
I rode their free turtle for a year before they quit giving me more months. Truth be known, I wanted rid of them by the second month. That's when I figured out that your internet wasn't supposed to crash to the desktop every thity minutes.
The connections suck with AOL. I finally found a site that had some good info on optimizing your connection, which helped (wish I could remember the name of it...modempage, modempages, something like that).
I also discovered that if you log on to AOL, minimize it, and use a different browser it won't lock up or crash as often, only one an hour or so.
AOL updates itself whether you want it to or not, and it refuses to die no matter what you try to do to get rid of it. It came preinstalled on my computer, unfortunately. Any computer that I own from now on I will build, and AOL will never come near it.