AIM chats in iChat

I am really enjoying using ichat over all the other clients out there, but I seem to be having some trouble joining aim chats (ie at aim.com). It pushes the window focus to ichat if it's already open, and if not, safari will launch ichat. However, the room doesn't come up. I can create empty rooms and when I try to join a room that exists, it ends up creating another empty room. I *really* don't want to use aol's official client. Any ideas on what might be causing me problems here?

I've been having a lot of problems with AIM and iChat lately. I lose a connection with the service and it doesn't tell me (shows me as still connected). Some of my IMs take a good 10 seconds for people to get, etc. When I use Fire or Adium, there are no problems. Which is tough, because I really love the iChat interface.