William:

I have not noticed AIM taking up a lot of system resources, or "mucking up"
settings, though I haven't seen AOL taking over any settings either. What you
may be referring to is how AOL asks you upon the first or second time after
being run to use it (AOL) to open all sorts of media files, HTML files, and
playing CDs. When it asks this, just uncheck everything. AIM however, does
not ask to do any of this, so I do not think it will mess with settings other
than wanting to start upon Windows startup, which can be easily disabled in
AIM's preferences.

If you are still unsure about installing AOL programs, try Trillian, which is
basically an all-in-one program, where you can see your contact lists from
AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc. Such that you can have "talk" with all your
AIM buddies through Trillian.

Jordan Sun
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