A customer who uses AOL for both personal and business-related e-mail recently called me with a problem.\u00a0 He had encountered the following error message when starting AOL on one of the accounts:<\/p>\n
\u201cAn error occurred while loading a file.\u00a0 AOL will attempt to restore the file.\u201d<\/p>\n
All he could do at that point was click OK.\u00a0 Afterward, he connected to AOL, but when he looked at the list of e-mails, all he could see were the envelopes \u2013 everything else was blank!\u00a0 To make matters worse, he was able to open these e-mails, but that was ridiculously dangerous without knowing who had sent them.<\/p>\n
This customer was using the latest version of AOL on Windows Vista.\u00a0 I searched in the usual places, and read every discussion thread to make sure I understood what the problem was.\u00a0 However, nothing <\/em>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).\u00a0 That fact alone ruled out uninstalling and re-installing the AOL software.<\/p>\n It took some time, but I was <\/strong>able to uncover a solution that worked.\u00a0 First, I backed up the Personal Filing Cabinet (PFC).\u00a0 Next, I compressed the PFC. To backup the contents of your PFC:<\/p>\n To compress the PFC:<\/p>\n After both of these tasks were completed, we checked his mail.\u00a0 Amazingly enough, all of the information was displayed for all of his e-mail!<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 It is clear the program detected a problem \u2013 perhaps the PFC was too big for AOL to handle properly, or had some slight form of corruption \u2013 but who ever coded this section of the program simply issued the wrong error message.\u00a0 (Alternatively, it could <\/em>be the correct error message, but the AOL software failed to perform the task correctly.)<\/p>\n I do not think that the AOL programming staff is going to correct this situation.\u00a0 Despite the dozens of threads that I found in various Internet searches, I am not certain if they are aware of this problem.\u00a0 Nonetheless, my customer is very pleased that I was able to solve his AOL e-mail problem.<\/p>\n I hope this blog post helps anyone else who encounters this error message.\u00a0 Let me know!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A customer who uses AOL for both personal and business-related e-mail recently called me with a problem.\u00a0 He had encountered the following error message when starting AOL on one of the accounts: \u201cAn error occurred while loading a file.\u00a0 AOL will attempt to restore the file.\u201d All he could do at that point was click …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,5],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-users","tag-aol","tag-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNote that each of these processes requires you to be signed out of AOL.<\/p>\n\n
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