I fixed a computer yesterday that had this problem. The man had left AOL, and tried another dial-up ISP. He switched more recently to a cable modem, but still got download speeds of about 8K/sec.
After disabling AOL's proxy cache, speeds jumped to about 150K/sec. The cache appeared to route all his port 80 traffic through ie3.proxy.aol.com.
You could gather proof as well: Setup AOL on a spare machine. Use it briefly. Then add Zonealarm and see what it blocks.
"Appeared to route?" Not proof my friend. More like a technical one-off anomaly. I was just joking before when I asked for proof. Your claim is utter nonsense, but I didn't want to be so blunt about it. AOL could not, even if it wanted to, cache http addresses from former customers. You're talking tens of millions of people and serious hardware resources. Do you really think other ISPs would put up with that? Do you really think no one would notice? Perhaps you're unaware that AOL's use of cache is a major topic of discussion and debate among website owners, and among the technical gurus who support the net. All aspects of its proxy cache functions are common knowledge among those guys, and they closely monitor AOL's use of the website content AOL temporarily stores in its cache. Do you think they don't know what hops visitors make to their sites, and that somehow it skips their attention that everyone, AOL member or not, just happens to through ie3.proxy.aol.com?
C'mon. Put your thinking cap on. AOL is not secretly controlling people's computers without anyone knowing about it.