connection to AOL every half hour/why?

I don't use AOL with the exception of instant messenger. I installed WallWatcher yesterday and brought it up before I went to bed last night and did not have instant messenger running. This morning I'm looking at the log and I have two outbound connections one minute apart every 30 minutes all night long and continuing today. The remote name shows as aim-charts.pf.aol.com in the log. The IP was 205.188.136.217 for most of the night and a whois gives quotewebvip-d01.blue.aol.com. The IP changed this morning to 64.12.185.89 but everything else is the same. As I'm writing this it has gone back to the other IP. Instant Messenger has permissions through zone alarm to send something outbound. Both of these IP's belong to AOL but tracert's to them dont' finish. Instant messenger doesn't run on startup on my machine and so there shouldn't be anything trying to help me know if I'm connected to the internet or not running. If it is, it doesn't show anywhere. May be an easy answer but I can't find it. I don't have any interest in feeding AOL information but if thats what it is I'm sure it would be widely publicized. I appreciate any help, ugly remarks about my using instant messenger, ideas, guesses, nail on the head answers, etc. It is interesting to note that when I connect to im then there is an outbound to 64.12.174.185 which is pretty close to the other one and that one appears to be an ad's server. Anyhow, thanks for your help.

I have seen both IP addresses when using the Everybuddy client on my FreeBSD systems and monitoring the TCP connections via Sniffit. I've disallowed these IP addresses using IPFW and the AIM services would no longer work correctly. When it would sign me in, the keep alive would fail and I would be disconnected and sometimes the "buddy list" updates would fail causing a disconnect as well. As you likely know the AIM client for windows has ad's that are displayed within the main chat window. One of the IP's is related to that though I've been unable to discern which it is. Hell, it may be both and I would never know because I don't see them if they are transmitted (one of the benefits of using *nix and the everybuddy client I guess).

Any how.. Hope this helps to shed some light on your situation
Regards.

"I went to bed last night and did not have instant messenger running."

There is a resident portion of AOL IM which loads with windows wether you have the IM program running or not. At least I assume there is. Chech the run, runonce, and run services keys in the registry.

Hey, i think that you should just uninstall it and reinstall. maybe you are missing a registry or one of the components that is needed to run aim. Like yahoo instant messanger comes with a lot of components. I hope that this helped, you can still look for other advices and but this is the best i can offer you.:)