I've noticed a few of my "buddies" on AOL Instant Messenger <== dont know why I use this

Two of them 'brag' about a few AOL skiddy programs that will boot you off, and do many other things. I have looked into this out of pure curiosity and found that these are potentially nasty, especially with things such as 'Slashers AIM' which could cause memory overflow errors and the like...

I was wondering if these could be hazerdous to the windows end user. Could tools such as these be security risks?

_Spyderpop_