A few days ago, a family member was having problems with her email. Since she uses AOL, I figured I’d download AOL Instant Messenger (which I had uninstalled in the past) and use that to IM her the location of a file I wanted her to download.
But as you know, AIM is gone, replaced by Triton, a big fat happy application.
It also installs AOL Explorer, which you cannot remove through Add/Remove Programs. And, of course, it puts that irritating “Try AOL Risk Free” entry in your Start menu.
AOL Explorer is basically a skin for Internet Explorer, and provides you no more security than IE. And I already have IE and Firefox on my home machine, so why would I want a third browser?
Well, after a quick search on Google, I found an entry on Trikenit that explains the painfully obvious way to uninstall AOL Explorer: You run the uninstallation program that’s located in the program files directory, under AOL, under Explorer. Thankfully, that’s gone.
And, a comment on Trikenit’s blog alerted me to a place where I can find old versions of AIM. I went right back to AIM 5.5 (which tries to pre-install WeatherBug and WildTangent, but you just need to opt-out of those if you don’t want them).
Alex Eckelberry