Perhaps your actual route to the server is screwed, or your router is being gay?
Try, for example, pinging or tracing route to login.oscar.aol.com. If that responds, telnet to login.oscar.aol.com 5190. Note that the default windows telnet program is weird, and uses space as a separater for port, not colon like everything else does. You should get the single reply "*e", which, assuming you knew what you were doing, means you could throw things at the server, and it would theoretically then do stuff, all be it in a non-practical way.
As a very last resort, try the Miranda TOC aim protocol, though I doubt that works anymore.
It doesn't have fun things like file transfers, either, and come to think of it, will probably not even run on new versions of Miranda.
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