We had that problem, too at first. I would sign on and all of a sudden my son's friends would be sending me messages! I had some pretty interesting conversations with some of them.......even though I revealed my true identity from the start! Anyway, there's a way to set AIM to keep it from launching automatically, I thinks it's in Preferences or something like that. We've since uninstalled it since we have AOL, too, so I don't remember now exactly where it is.