A customer who uses AOL for both personal and business-related e-mail recently called me with a problem.  He had encountered the following error message when starting AOL on one of the accounts:

“An error occurred while loading a file.  AOL will attempt to restore the file.”

All he could do at that point was click OK.  Afterward, he connected to AOL, but when he looked at the list of e-mails, all he could see were the envelopes – everything else was blank!  To make matters worse, he was able to open these e-mails, but that was ridiculously dangerous without knowing who had sent them.

This customer was using the latest version of AOL on Windows Vista.  I searched in the usual places, and read every discussion thread to make sure I understood what the problem was.  However, nothing seemed to indicate what actions would be appropriate, especially when this customer could use a different screen name and have full functionality (meaning he could see who the e-mails were from).  That fact alone ruled out uninstalling and re-installing the AOL software.

It took some time, but I was able to uncover a solution that worked.  First, I backed up the Personal Filing Cabinet (PFC).  Next, I compressed the PFC.
Note that each of these processes requires you to be signed out of AOL.

To backup the contents of your PFC:

  1. Click the Mail menu and select Mail Settings.
  2. Click the Manage Saved Mail drop-down menu and select Backup.
  3. Click the Backup Now button.
  4. When the task is finished, click the Save button.

To compress the PFC:

  1. Click the Mail menu and select Mail Settings.
  2. Click the Manage Saved Mail drop-down menu and this time select Compact.
  3. Click the Compact Now button, and then click the OK button.
  4. When the task is finished, click the Save button.

After both of these tasks were completed, we checked his mail.  Amazingly enough, all of the information was displayed for all of his e-mail!

Despite what the text of the error message indicated, the AOL software did not restore any file, nor did it attempt to do the correct thing.  It is clear the program detected a problem – perhaps the PFC was too big for AOL to handle properly, or had some slight form of corruption – but who ever coded this section of the program simply issued the wrong error message.  (Alternatively, it could be the correct error message, but the AOL software failed to perform the task correctly.)

I do not think that the AOL programming staff is going to correct this situation.  Despite the dozens of threads that I found in various Internet searches, I am not certain if they are aware of this problem.  Nonetheless, my customer is very pleased that I was able to solve his AOL e-mail problem.

I hope this blog post helps anyone else who encounters this error message.  Let me know!