Thanks for the encouraging words regarding our customer support team, and I'm pleased to hear you are able to access your Auctiva account once again. This may come as a surprise, but I must admit that I didn't do anything to alleviate the problems you were facing. However, I don't mind being called "Mike the Magician" anyway
There have actually been some ongoing issues between our ISP and AOL lately that has caused many AOL customers to experience slow connection speeds on the Auctiva website, which I suspect were accountable for the behavior you were experiencing. We have a support case open with our ISP, Cogent, and are currently counting on them to get this matter worked out with AOL.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really sound like the connection speed issue between AOL and Cogent will be resolved any time too soon though. Based on our communications with Cogent, it sounds like both parties are receiving a lot of complaints pertaining to connection speed, especially during peak hours, and that they are going to have to work out a deal to get more lines running between them.
We're also going to begin using a second ISP in the near future so, if this issue is still ongoing at that point, we'll be able to alleviate this issue by routing all of our AOL connections through that ISP. However, it will probably be a couple months before this is accomplished, so we're really hoping that AOL and Cogent will have worked out a deal by then.
If the problems you have been experiencing actually weren't associated with the problem I described above, I hope the content of my response doesn't get you too concerned. I hope you have an enjoyable holiday season as well!
-Mike