Well, I seem to have found a problem that not even I can solve:

One of my neighbors is using AOL 8.0 on a Windows XP machine. I have been trying to get her to use the forums for a while now, but she keeps having problems signing in. So last week, I decided to have a look myself. Despite all my efforts, I could not get signed into the forums on her machine. I tried:

• Clearing the cache
  
• Deleting the cookies
  
• Entering Gunks.com as a site from which to accept cookies
  
• Lowering the security settings to their lowest setting
  
• Restarting the machine & aol several times

And still, bupkiss! Every time I signed in using any valid username and password, the following screen would show the forums with the "login" option on the top menu. I am totally perplexed. Any of you folks hold the key to the secret of this unholy allience between microsoft and aol?

-em

My inlaws use AOL 8.
When on their machine, I log in to their AOL account then minimize it.
Then I open IE and surf to Gunks.com with ease.
Hope it works for you.

i had that same problem on the computers at work (though they're not on AOL), but adding gunks.com to the cookies list fixed the problem. is it possible that she's running a separate firewall program that could be causing problems? its the only other thing i could think of.

I tried starting IE outside of AOL but still no go (though that seemed promising).

Where in XP would you add gunks.com to the list of available cookie sites? I thought I found a place to do it in the brower, but not in the O/S. I didn't even think there could be a firewall running on her machine, but who knows. I'll check.

-em

i did it in the browser as well. you probably did the same as i did, but just in case, go to:
Tools --> Internet Options --> Privacy --> Edit (at the bottom) --> type in Gunks.com and be sure you click ALLOW
good luck!

To check for a firewall running in XP go to Settings, Network Connections, right click on the network connection for the ISP and then Properties. Click on the Advanced tab and the firewall information is there. A firewall turned on shouldn't matter as you are just using port 80 (http). I have my firewall turned on and it works okay for me, albeit I don't use AOL (Amateurs On Line).

It could be a corrupt index.dat that's causing the problem. Each cookie is a small text file, but information regarding each cookie is stored in a database file called index.dat. This system file cannot be deleted or changed manually since it's in use by the system. Deleting cookies manually, or through IE's options does not clean up this file, it continues to grow and frequently gets corrupt.

It's possible that the index.dat is corrupt; in which case you can download a cleaner to delete the index.dat (or flag it for deletion after a restart). I use a cleaner called Spider (http://www.fsm.nl/ward/ works for win2k, don't know about winxp but it should work). There are others out there which will work.

The AOL8 browser has cookies automatically turned on and they cannot be disabled. That's the extent of my knowledge of AOL.

Cache servers can cause problems with cookies; the web page gets cached, and logging in doesn't bring up a new page but the original cached page. I doubt AOL has a cache server, they were more trouble than they were worth. Especially with high speed connections, cache servers have generally been phased out.

A firewall will not block cookies; cookies are transferred by http, and thus are indistinguisable from web pages from the point of view of the firewall. At least software firewalls like that built into XP and zone alarm can't tell what's a cookie and what's a web page. Application level firewalls, the ones big corporations spend tens of thousands of dollars might be able to, but for the most part they don't... you don't want a VP complaining he can't get into hotmail or his yahoo finance page.

-QtM