I’ve had AOL for about 3 years, we had the Dial-up for a year and a half, and now we have AOL Broadband.
I didnt like their software at all, it has loads of services running in the background, so constantly takes up precious system resources and CPU time.
However, with the advent of AOL 9, things have improved. In the UK at least, you dont have to run their software to connect to ADSL, and they give you a firewall, and spyware blocker, which is very useful.
The internet connection is fast, and almost never has problems, the only problem I had was when all connections to MSN were blocked for a few hours.
They e-mail you alerting you about any planned downtime, and it usually takes place in the early hours of the morning anyway.
Going back to the software, the profile system is really bad, setting a profile makes your e-mail address become completely useless with the amount you are spammed, which is ok since you can’t use your own mail client anyway. The occasional message from ’hotchick69xx’ PMing me to go to her website to see webcam pics of her forced me to abandon the AOL software.
The tech support is very good, its a freephone number and you don’t have to wait listning to the lighthouse family as their hold music for very long. When they answer the problem is usually fixed very quickly.