I think this site had a problem. We have 6 computers and one of them started acting up about the time Wampuscat started having trouble. I had no problems anywhere else. The problem went away Sunday. I never had the problem before.
The settings for cookies will alter your system's behavior, but I went through them and compared them with one of the laptops and the settings were identical and correct. 4 of the computers, including the one with a problem, are running identical versions of Windows and IE. The only suspicion on my end is that AOL 9 is running on the problem PC and not the others. It's guilty of being the cause of so many problems, I never rule it out. I don't use it for anything but mail, so it isn't directly related to the AOL perversion of IE.
I also started getting PM notifications I hadn't asked for, which hasn't stopped, but I don't mind it.