I'm still a bit lost...

As I understand, the most reccomended way to get around AoL's useless-ness is to uninstall v9.0 and reinstal v8.0 or re-install v9.0 and make sure you don't agree to the little extras, or something like that? Is there not a way to disable them without unistalling and reinstalling AoL - it seems like a hell of a palava!