any help would be greatly appreciated. cutting a long story short i am on aol.had to re-install. thats when probs started. now , i can sign on to aol but can`t get on to any sites. can get my e mail tho. none of my screen names can access any sites. found i can go as guest, sign any of my screen names and i am back to normal able to go on any sites. to me its seems my screen names are being blocked but they are okay if i use them by signing in as guest. been in touch with aol helpline a doz times. they say my aol downloads are not being fully downloaded. yet they can`t explain how they are ok when i go on as guest. i`ve tried looking at firewall, thinking the screen names are blocked but no idea what they go under on there to make them exceptions. can anybody help with any suggetions thank you

your screen name would have to be applied to a filter on a network, a flag or tag so-to-speak.
Have you tried to reinstall AOL, or if you are using Win Vista or 7 run it in compatability mode?
Note, I have no experience with AOL. I hate the service personally because it is so difficult to get off of the PC's I've seen it installed on.

I'm surprised AOL can't help you, but then again not. Customer service doesn't seem to be what it used to IMHO.

The fact that you can sign in as guest and obtain normal access though says your screen name isn't being filtered by AOL or your Firewall because if it were (and I'm not sure you can filter a screen name through a firewall vs. filtering an IP address. Hence you're looking for a filter itself that is a configuration of a program and not likely a firewall.) you'd flag the filter or firewall when the guest parameters were passed to AOL through your firewall.
By parameters I mean something to the effect of a line in the configuration file which would read LIKE guest&signon=username or something like that (this is an example).

Reinstalling AOL would be a solution, or you could bore through the AOL files and differentiate what you can determine by the lines entered in the files and see if there is an error.

You might want to post this in firewalls and networks though, a more experienced person might be able to give you better advice as to the nature of any filter related to your firewall or the AOL service and maybe even show what lines in AOL files you are looking for to find errors in their syntax.

will take your advice and post at that other place que sera