I've never tried AIM, for that exact reason, windows instability + programming incompetince = crash. the only other aol software I've seen is some supposed clean up program that cleaned the obvious folders as well as the registry, on my old man's laptop(which I warned him against). between the safemode reboots I was able to recover the data he needed, so the two of three I've seen are terrible.
and if you've run windows for 3-4 years without a reinstall, you don't run it very hard. I'm not an "every 6 months" guy, but I haven't seen anything reliable over 2 years.