Brent,
When I leave the site I always log off. Also before I go off line I always clear all cookies, off line files and history of places visited. After I get off line I do a search for any newly created files and if there are any I look at them to see what they are and delete most of them. I keep my cache cleaned all the time and also use explorer to go in and delete certain AOL files that from time to time become garbaged. This is just a ritual that I have always gone through and nothing is working so far as getting my e-mail notifications back.
As a side note, just to make sure, yesterday I uninstalled AOL completely, defragged the disk, reinstalled AOL and it is still the same in that computer.
Ron