It's probably just an issue with the connection between your ISP and the AIM servers. The internet has been sort of flaky as a whole lately because of some problems with Cisco routers...honestly I think that if you just put up with it for a while it'll go away. Of course you can still try reinstalling, but I suspect that this is a problem you can't do anything about.
P.S. How is it that you have an 866 MHz processor and DDR RAM? I didn't think there were any motherboards that supported the non-XP Athlons and DDR RAM, and I'm almost certain there are no Athlon XPs that run at 866 MHz. What type of motherboard do you have?
<Viserys> I'm sitting here slapping someone's ass
<Viserys> and there's no gratification