Joel
I know how frustrating AOL can be.
Here is what is actually going on. When you went to the message the first time, it cached it to your hard disk on your computer. When you went there again it checked your harddisk before going out and retrieving the page. Since you had already been to that page it just used what it had stored (cached) on your computer. The main page had refreshed where it showed one reply to your message but the message itself had not.
To fix you can usually just hit reload or refresh (depending on your browser). If that doesn't work, hold down the Shift key while hitting reload. This will force a full reload of the page including the images on the page (whereas just hitting reload will only check for differeneces in the text).
Another good tip is that you can run Netscape or Internet Explorer inside of AOL. The browsers will use AOL as your connection and run right through it. This allows you to open up multiple browser windows instead of just the one that AOL limits you to.

ok ok, so I do computer support besides the website =) Hopefully that helps out some.

-Rob