Pull the release and allow AOL 8.2.2 to be accessed until you work out the bugs
I have enjoyed an AOL Bulk Mail Exemption for the nonprofit PaForestCoalition.org for 17 years. After downloading AOL Gold, I lost over a dozen mailing lists - e-mail addresses of over 2,000 members.
This ranks as the worst rollout ever.
It is possible that some contacts were saved offline in the old AOL Desktop (version 9.8 or lower). Since the option to export the address book from the old AOL Desktop is not available, we recommend opening the Address Book in from the old AOL Desktop (there is no need to sign in, in order to open the Address Book) and after retrieving the missing contacts, to manually add them in AOL Desktop Gold (they will be saved on the server, and can be accessed from different devices).