Bellsouth DSL, AOL, and McAfee Personal firewall not working

[Lee]

I just got Bellsouth DSL. But, most of their help people seem busy with hurricane-related things. So, rather than wait on hold for hours (and displace someone who might actually have an emergency), I figured I'd ask you guys. In my experience, the 8dimensional crew has a 100% problem resolution rate !

I just installed my DSL service. It went well. There didn't seem to be any problems. However, I didn't want to go without some kind of firewall and I wasn't ready to transition away from AOhell. I installed their free McAfee personal firewall.

Now, I can connect to AOL and get e-mail. However, I cannot go to any web links in AOL. I cannot use AOL's browser to see anything on the world wide web. However, if I go to Firefox or Internet explorer, both browsers access the web just fine and go to the Bellsouth homepage and any other website that I want. I've also found that if I don't start AOL first, the Firefox browser and Internet explorer are a little slow to get rolling out to the world wide web.

At this point, I'm a bit perplexed. Do you guys have any ideas?

Thanks!

[HamDemon]

The problem is probably that both Bellsouth's and AOL's software are hellbent on total dominion over your computer. They are vying for supremacy over your hard drive as you speak, they both take root in your system, and taint almost every piece of software you have installed. They both send digital tendrils of death and destruction through every last sector of your hard drive, the only way to remove them is by force, and almost everything will cease to function when they are removed.

Well, it may not be that bad, but those two in particular are notoriously intrusive


You may need to uninstall the AOL stuff and then reinstall it, but, seriously, in my experience ISP software kinda hooks itself to everything, and when you remove it, everything it was attached to stops working.