Nancy,

Avast should not block AIM. You need to tell us more about your system configuration.

You can shut down the Standard shield running resident to see if AIM will load. This can be done by right clicking on the A ball and passing the cursor over “Stop Provider”. Find Standard Shield module and click on it. It will stop the provider.

If you are receiving an error message that AIM is being blocked, then I strongly feel that you have a firewall installed and is blocking the application exe file.

Let us know.