"...can anyone suggest a way of removing it completely?"
Yes, there's a way to remove it completely.
I don't belong here, and I'll leave as soon as I finish this post (I'm not a pilot and have no rumors for any of you) but I couldn't help taking pity on EW's plight.
If he's finding AOL's processes running in Task Manager then AOL is not uninstalled fully, so removing files and folders won't help.
There's a Connectivity Service that runs even after so-called "removal" of older versions of AOL; it's bad coding on AOL's part that doesn't let you remove it the way you should be able to.
There's an AOL Adapter in Windows Device Manager that has to be removed, as well.
I'd check these pages for what EW needs:
http://anti-aol.livejournal.com/29611.html (remove Connectivity Service)
http://anti-aol.livejournal.com/35102.html (remove AOL's Adapter)
And see how he does from there.
