Need help! Major annoyance with AIM disconnecting.

Thanks for reading so here’s my problem…

I have been using AIM 5.9 for a while now and I’ve had this problem ever since I started using it… it will disconnect and reconnect at random intervals, sometimes minutes apart sometimes hours apart. On my screen the buddy list all of a sudden goes grey as if everyone signed off then on again and all the IMs that I have that are open say “SN signed on at XX:XX”. It seems as if everyone else just resigned on. I ask people who have me on their buddy lists and they say that from their point of view, it says that I signed off and back on really quickly. I can only assume the reason why it seems so strange from my side is that the buddy list is lagging or something and that’s why it seems like everyone else is just signing back on all of a sudden.

I use a laptop and so I am able to bring it around and test it out with different connections and this happens whether or not I’m wired in or on a wireless network and the rest of my internet is never affected by it. File transfers also aren’t affected by it and if I am direct connected to someone, it doesn’t disconnect me from them. I can tell it is about to happen sometimes because I try to send an IM and it won’t go through or I try to check someone’s buddy info and it wont show up.

I updated to the new beta version of 5.9 but it’s still happening.

I am assuming its a compatibility issue or something or maybe some spyware I picked up along the way is having a weird effect on my AIM but it’s really driving me crazy. I don’t use any AIM addons so I can’t attribute it to that.

I wouldn’t mind switching to AIM 5.5 or some earlier version but when I tried using 5.5, the file transfers between my friends and I wouldn’t work so I switched back to 5.9.

Does anyone know how to fix this and if not, how I can get file transfers and direct connects to work on 5.5 so that I can switch to that? Please, this has been a problem for me for a while now and it is driving me crazy.