Turns out that we needed to play enough games to collect the 21 tools hidden in all the puzzles - at the cost of countless more hours of frustration. Kids initially get three 'Curiosity Tools' (a trampoline, a ball and a ladder) to help George get from here to there, but we didn't succeed in more than a dozen tries. One game in the circus tent, for instance, asks kids to find a way to help George bounce, jump or fly from the top of a bus and across the circus floor to grab a bundle of balloons before they float away. The problem, it seems, is that games require a tremendous amount of trial and error, which in turn demands gobs of patience. My 3-year-old started to cry from frustration after a few minutes, while my 6 1/2-year-old was just perplexed. Now he's romping around downtown USA, from the park to the candy factory to the circus, and challenging kids to solve 60 puzzles. Rey's Curious George is still making mischief 40 years after he hit bookstores. AIM's sleeper feature is Add-Ins, which lets multiple AIM users share applications.

But there is no video chat, nor is there even an indicator when the other party is typing. Frills include a 'Warning' alert attached to known troublesome users, plus free voice and non-free AIM Phone chat. AIM also kept making us type in our Hotmail password, even though it's supposed to remember sign-on info. Signing on to an AOL account took much longer than the sign-on to AIM, and changing your default return address requires 72 hours. And the e-mail integration, which alerts you of new AOL or Internet mail and can display it in a Web browser window, was the opposite of instant. But in our test, the firewall support didn't include AIM's file-sharing options, which should let you drag and drop a file into the chat window or designate a shared swap folder on your hard drive. The new version does expand AIM's connections, offering a 'proxy' option to vault over office firewalls and the ability to monitor e-mail accounts for new messages, then reply from an AOL, CompuServe or Netscape e-mail address. AIM's interface - particularly the annoying 'AOL Today' window' - is dominated by gaudy ads and links to AOL content, with no way to beautify the application by downloading new skins or themes. Details: The most obvious change in the latest AOL Instant Messenger is its ad density, which now approaches NASCAR levels.

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