Anti-AOL.Org is dead. No other way of putting it really. The information that *was* here is out of date and I've no plans to do an in-depth research new information, nor update the site any further. That said I was shocked at how many hits this site *still* gets. Obviously, even in AOL's current state, people still have questions about why it sucks, and/or how to cancel.

A Brief Analysis of AOL's Current Suckage:

Disclaimer: My girlfriend currently uses AOL and has no plans to quit, this is where I'm obtaining my current information from.

Dan: and didn't you say you're getting it for free now as well?
GF: yes 
Dan: how did you do that?
GF: called them and told them to stop charging me  
GF: they are free now to anyone who asks 
GF: they can charge you only if you want online help and want to use dial up 
GF: that is their loophole for continuing to charge people until they call in to ask them to stop 
Dan: so anything you dislike about it now?
GF: its the same was before 
GF: but the only thing is there is more advertising now 
GF: probably how they can give it away free now 
GF: and their web browser is slow as hell
From her AOL install, I've seen that it may install Macafee Anti-Virus and a spyware scanner. If the user already has other products installed to take care of this, it can conflict with this software (I do not know if AOL's programmers have taken this into account or not). Additionally, I do know that uninstalling Macafee can be a painful process, and I have seen installs of it go pear shaped. I currently have no information as to if it changes networking settings like it has in previous versions.
Previously AOL had used a proxy server to retrieve websites, compress the information, and then deliver it to the end-user's browser. I had my girlfriend view a page on this server while I tailed the http logs, the result: 
207.200.116.74 - "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; AOL 9.1; AOLBuild 4334.5000; Windows NT 6.0; Media Center PC 5.0;)"
I've edited the user-agent string for the sake of brevity, but aside from removing a few technical bits, the string is unchanged. To break it all down for you... 207.200.166.74 is the IP of the requesting agent - in this case - Tracing route to cache-ntc-ab10.proxy.aol.com [207.200.116.74]. This indicates that AOL is likely still doing proxy image compression by default. For the end-user this can mean an image with compression artifacts present (a distorted picture). This can easily be circumvented by either turning off image compression in your AOL configuration, or using a browser outside of AOL's software (recommended).

Helpful Links:

Final Word:

As mentioned above I'll no longer be maintaining this site. I do however have other web projects in the works and as soon as they're ready for launch I'll post links to them here. It's been a fun ride, but I'm off to bigger and better things. - Dan