i use all the nice little programs to try and help me recover it as well too, none of them work now that AIM doesn't store passwords locoally anymore... greattttttt.
You can not restore a buddy list after it has been deleted. Once deleted the files can no longer be accessed. What you have to do is add every body back in manually.
Reinstall the previous version of AOL that you had, once you install the previous version it will give you an option to export the buddy list. Once you export the buddy list go into your aol 9. 0 and you should be able to import the list with no problem.