If you’re just concerned with Instant Messenging, I really don’t think that AIM is any more harmful than AOL. If you’re concerned with malware, just be careful during the installation of AIM. Uncheck all the things that it may attempt to install and you should be fine. The games on AIM use wild tangent which is malware. Just don’t have any of that installed. I mentioned using AIM Ad Hack earlier on. That works well for removing the ads on the buddylist. Someone else might have a better utility, but it gets the job done for me.

any solution to this problem? i’m having the same problem with AIMCheck.

HijackThis is a tool, that lists all installed browser add-on, buttons, startup items and allows you to inspect, and optionally remove selected items. The program can create a backup of your original settings and also ignore selected items. Additional features include a simple list of all startup items, default start page, online updates and more. Intended for advanced users.

It lists everything… including some of the things that you may actually use. For example, it will list the acrobat plugin for IE if you have it installed. It also lists everything that starts, meaning some things you may want start. In these cases, just list them as excludes and they wont show up in your future scans. You remove basically anything that you don’t use or need. Rather than posting your log, you might as well just google anything you dont know. Theres tons of websites that will pop up just by typing in the .exe into google.

As for AIM ads. I use AIM Ad Hack (http://aftermath.dyndns.org:8888/~aimadhack/) It will remove your ads, as well as remove other things that you may not want. In the install there’s options. Just make sure you read everything rather than hitting next because you might end up with aim missing some things. If worst comes to worst you might just have to reinstall aim (which isn’t a big deal since you can just install over keeping your settings).

As for firefox….it’s seriously no different than IE. I attached a screen of my browser window. Without much effort, you can make it appear exactly the same as IE. I’m not forcing it on you, I’m just showing you it’s not that terrible. I was the same way…I didn’t really want to make the switch because I was so used to IE as was my family. However, when I went on vacation I was using my cousins computer and he used it, so I gave it a shot. Now I haven’t gone back.

Besides Wild Tangent, Aim really doesn’t have any spyware (unless you consider the ads spyware, but they’re more of just an annoyance). Your IE probably has browser hijackers. Hijack This (http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html) is a great program for investigating these problems, but there are many false positives so be careful using it. If you don’t have it already and you’re using XP get service pack 2 as it helps a lot with activex problems in internet explorer. I suggest you just use firefox, but that may be pushing it.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html

Firefox is a great browser that is much more secure than IE…it has popup blocking built in and it is very customizable with loads of plugins, extensions, and themes.