Stephen said:
A mate asked me to sort out his new Compaq laptop; well yes "new" as in
"never switched on" but "not new" as in bought would you believe, in
2008. It took about 24hrs to get up to date with MS Update but it seems
nicely stable now.
I do quite well with PC configuration and like a nice simple setup - a
clear desktop, organised folders, sensible QuickLaunch and StartMenu
entries and only tried and tested utilities... but this came with AOL
loaded... Eeek!!
I tried AOL in about 1998-ish (when I was a lot less wise) and had a hell
of a lot of trouble - it took over the PC. It was necessary to
reinstalled the OS to get back control.
On this laptop I used the Uninstaller to remove AOL (internet services
[my description]) and AIM - two apps in total, but the Uninstaller
remains resolutely in place as does the System Tray entry. I've not tried
anything else yet but would like to remove AOL before returning the
laptop to its owner.
I'm afraid you'll need to contact AOL's tech support for resolution of
problems with -- or caused by -- their product; Microsoft has no control
over AOL's product quality, or lack thereof. You best course of action
would be to remove it.
Sadly, the only practical way I've ever found to completely remove AOL
from an operating system is to format the hard drive and perform a clean
installation. I absolutely loathe having to resort to a hard drive format
to fix what should be a relatively minor issue, but it takes a lot less
time than manually removing/replacing all of the Windows system files that
AOL replaces with their own versions and the hundreds of unnecessary
registry entries.