Okay, this might do it.... unless AOL have made a real mess of IE (doubtful, but possible...!)
Are you familiar with using the registry editor, regedit.exe? If not, it's not that daunting as long as you stay away from the "delete" key!!
First of all, shut down all instances of Internet Explorer (including this one!!
)
Assuming you're not familiar with regedit (apologies if it's a grandma/eggs sitation here!)... choose "Run..." from the Start menu and type "regedit" and hit enter. You should now be looking at something a little like Window Explorer in appearance -- folders on the left, data on the right.
Navigate with the folders to the following "path":
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Internet Settings
Looking down the Name column on the right, you should see an entry called "SyncMode5" with "REG_DWORD" in the next column and then a number of the form "0x00000000 (0)"
Those numbers have the following meaning:
0x00000000 Never
0x00000002 Every time you start MSIE
0x00000003 Every visit to the page
0x00000004 Automatically
By double-clicking on the "SyncMode5" text you can change the value -- it looks like you want "3" from your earlier post.
Hit OK on the dialog to save the setting and start-up IE to see if it likes the value...