Windows Vista AOL 9 VR/Vista problem

I wonder if anyone can shed some light on this rather strange fault I am having on my Inspiron 531 connecting via an AOL box. I have Windows Vista Home premium (French version) running and AOL 9 VR. All has been well until recently when a fault became obvious in the way emails were handled. Normally whilst surfing through AOL a new incoming email would show itself and a short sound would be heard. A few days ago we noticed that this did not happen but if we turned off AOL and then went back in new emails appeared. To try and correct this fault I reloaded AOL 9 VR from the CD but whilst this cured the original fault we now find that typing anything in the AOL search bar produces no result and also that clicking on some links in the AOL welcome screen also fail. Emails in and out work but we cannot use AOL to get onto the web.

We can get to the web via Internet Explorer however. I have tried downloading AOL 9 VR from the web but no improvement. I have an older machine that I can hook up running a different operating system and an earlier version of AOL 9 and this works fine. I therefore suspect that Vista is corrupted or altered in some way .

The fact that we can connect to AOL but not the web through AOL is most odd. I have tried turning off the Windows Firewall but this and other fiddling has produced no benefit. I notice that there have been several updates to Windows Vista of late and I have tried restoring the machine to a date before this fault became evident but again no useful result. So any suggestions would be welcome…………………………JR