Thanks for the info Clay. Never occurred to me to google it.
I do have AOL. That's weird, I've had AOL since the early 90's and have never had a problem like that were it was an access problem due to my ISP in general. Plus I've gone all these years without that message, but it's not just the petition site, on the google pages there seems to be a ton of them, and it seems to be a well known problem. I hope it's not something new that I will be seeing more and more. Many of the sites recommend downloading IE-6, but I thought that is what AOL used.
Oh well, if it gets worse, yet another reason to get something besides AOL, I've been threatening to leave AOL for a long time, just too much a creature of habit.