Many have experienced problems operating AOL after updating Mac OS to version 9.1 — under certain circumstances, AOL unexpectedly quits. But as several helpful MacCentral readers have pointed out, there’s a solution.
“I’ve been running AOL 5.0 on two Macs running OS 9.1 with no problems,” David Schwab said. “I have seen this problem with AOL, and the cure is always to delete a number of AOL pref files.”
In the America Online folder, in the Prefs folder, you need to delete the following files: “3.0 Preferences” (yes they still call it that), “AOL External Prefs,” and, in the Data folder, “Art Database” and the “Window Size Database.” Your prefs will, of course, need to be reset.
“I keep a copy of these files just for this reason,” said Schwab. “Also, AOL needs to have its memory increased to about 22 MB to run crash free. And with Mac OS 9 you should have Virtual Memory (VM) turned on. You get much less memory fragmentation, and I find programs like AOL run better. I have noticed absolutely no degradation in performance using VM with 9.0.4 and above.”