ok since i was stuck with aol for a while: 1- first of all, NEVER use the normal aol, use the aoldialer.exe sure it sucks but it sucks WAAAAY less than aol. 2- second of all, the whole shutdown computer thing, happens from a setting inside of aol, if you can't find the setting, and just don't want your pc to shut down, then open the command prompt, and after you choose to log off of aol, type "shutdown -a" without the quotations, this is not a solution, just a pallative treatment until you find the source of the problem.