I just spent 2 days trying to get any aol version higher than 7 to work on my friends computer. I tryed those "things" like reset adapter, clear cache, stop and start services, Blah blah blah. I even went through the registry and cleaned out anything that had to do with AOL or that ACS crap attached to it with no sucess.
Finnally I went here:
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/8437 and when I was done deleting the "OEM inf files (location C:\windows\inf) that had to do with AOL (and all that had 0 bytes in them) and restarted, The nightmare was over.
Was able to run the latest version of AOL with no more "must install files" over and over again!
Good luck