So Easy to Abuse, No Wonder It's Number One

To say that AOL sucks as an ISP is an insult to both oral sex and Crazy Straws. To say that AOL is a dog of a program is animal abuse.

If you say anything good about AOL, you are a paid shill -- I hope. I mean, really. I even hate having to use Nutscrape HTML tags on this site because AOL owns them (and how really sad is that? -- Netscape was one of the best programs on the market up to that point, a real pioneer of the open-source movement)... I don't even allow it on my systems anymore and remove it from others' systems when I work on them.

So, the drivers updates did not work; they seemed to for a while and I was hopeful, but after I left the system up all night, I woke up to the bottom of windows. I'm 98% positive it is a hardware issue concerning this mouse that refuses to work under Linux and am exactly one 24-oz. away from a full, destructive recovery on both partitions...

But then there's this: "Access Denied - SB.DLL".

This little gem comes up when I try to manually delete AOL 9.0 from my system. "Why are you doing that, MD?," I hear you ask.

Well, friends, because the normal, accepted method of uninstalling it through Control Panel left the entire directory on my system!

SB.DLL is known, though somewhat obscure, malware. This is obviously a variation, because no Malware-Detection programs (I've used Yahoo! Anti-Spy, Ad-Aware, Housecall, BitDefender [which only works through IE, by the way]) have found it and it does not show up in the Registry or Startup Folder the way the instructions for manually removing it say it should. It is located in the AOL core directory, along with all the other effing malware on my computer...

Does this issue have anything to do with the issue at-hand?

I don't know.

But I do know this: AOL is the biggest virus online, period. They also own both Netscape and CompuServe. Forbes magazine said of them, in/around 199x, that they had gone completely against the accepted business model because (and I paraphrase), 'They are the only company on the market that treats their customers like complete shit and the customers keep coming back.'

But my audio is out and has been since I got here, so I am 98% certain that this stupid optical mouse has hosed my system.

But, people -- please!! -- AOL heaves harder than Lindsay Lohan on a long ride home. Don't be fooled by their "new market strategy" -- AOL charged me as much as @$30.00/month for 10 years, then started TOSing me left and right in 2005 (when they discontinued their volunteer "HostGuide program") for saying such things as "chick," "that sucks," and "shut up." And every, single page and screen on AOL contains at least 3-4 ads -- banner ads, square ads, text links, click-throughs...

And AOL isn't -- careful clicking here! (this is done to make a point, but the site is rife with virii) -- a frigging social website; AOL has been the "NUMBER ONE" ISP for going on... ten years now! And is now trying to take over Yahoo's position as number one portal...

ANYhoo... I'm hoping I have a hardware issue, because I'm telling you: giving away e-mail accounts and their horseshit "services" is the very effing least AOL SHOULD do after ten years of overpriced services which they are now are offering for free, horrid customer service, and what basically amounts to customer abuse. And the fact that this issue started when I was on AOL, and that I am unable to delete the motherf&@k!n@ thing from my computer -- that I will have to manually go through my every registry entry with a fine-toothed comb and a pair of tweezers just to get this thing off of here! Rebooting constantly to double-check, soaking both my computer's memory and my own to get this right -- to make sure I can get back into MY OWN COMPUTER! -- having to literally do what amounts to forensic science in order to find every, last, little fingerprint and footprint AOL left all across my property...

That just irks me, y'all.

AOL's been looking for a fist to put its collective face in for years now; it was a bully, it was a jerk, it constantly changed its contractual obligations without alerting its consumers... it took advantage of us all, and now that it's spent all its money on direct-mail advertising and corporate buy-outs, it wants to cozy up to those of us who stood by it before thye forced us to forsake it years ago... without apologizing -- without so much as a, "We not only made millions of dollars off of you, we also made BILLIONS of dollars off of all the advertisers WE DID NOT SCREEN, so thank you, sucker!"

And I know that some of the cats here know some of the cats there, and (in a WAY lower-echelon way) I used to work with a lot of the tech-support people who came from AOL, and I'd just like to ask that maybe -- just maybe -- you could sit those guys down in front of a monitor, tape their eyes open, and force them to look at what they have done to the online community they so proudly claim to be a part of.

I've seen this crap since grade-school.

AOL brought the dirty magazines to school and then told on us for looking at them; they made millions off of the consumers, who paid them for access to adult-oriented materials, then blackmailed us for accessing it.

"Family"-oriented means something completely different to the execs over at AOL, y'all.

So easy to abuse, no wonder it's number one.