AOL Quirks and
Fixes 
If you are an AOL user you probably both love it and hate it. You love for it's simplicity and sense of community. You love being able to chat, use Instant Messages and see when your friends in your buddy list are online. But the love affair may end when you venture out onto the Internet. You may find it difficult or impossible to access various Internet features. But rest assured that those problems are much more easily managed these days than just little over a year ago when most subscribers were still using AOL's 3.0 software.
It may help to understand that AOL did not start out to be an Internet service provider. It was an online community that served it's own members and offered a lot of features. AOL did that quite well. Partly because of effective marketing techniques and partly because of it's simplicity, it became an extremely popular service. It appealed to beginners who had little or no computer experience but were anxious to get online. As AOL grew, it's members wanted more. The Internet was exploding in popularity too and customers wanted Internet access. AOL became what it did not intend to be, an Internet Service Provider.
Perhaps AOL wasn't prepared to move as quickly as they did from a proprietary online service to an ISP charging a flat rate for unlimited service. Certainly, the service has made a reputation for putting the cart before the horse. There are lots of folks out there who don't like AOL and some who spend a lot of time and effort to proclaim their dislike. For some links to some of these sites read "AOL: The ISP You Love to Hate" by Philip Kain on About.com. Although many AOL still users claim to "hate" AOL, the company advertises itself as "Number 1".
Significant AOL difficulties have been solved with the introduction of AOL 4.0 in mid 1998 and with the recent release of AOL 5.0. There are some shortcuts and fixes to help out with the remaining problems and if you are an AOL user with high speed access, it's worth reading about the "Connectoid Bug".
Here is a little history of AOL's quirks and some suggestions for dealing with them.
