I did a little digging and here's what i've found. Now I don't know if this can be of any help to you but I went to Tjerk's webpage and stumbled across this little section:

From the page:

You can not connect from AOL? AOL protects you from the evil IRC world and blocks most of the IRC servers. Read the AOL Help file to learn what servers you can use without problems.

Now as I said, I don't know if this will help or not but I don't know of anything else that can help you.