I'd agree with the other posters regarding AOL and BT - AOL software will take over your laptop and is very hard to eradicate.

Search Google for Free ISP in the UK and there are a bunch of them to try - as they are Pay As You Go there are no contracts or anything so you can sign up for 2 or 3 and see which is best. Just make sure that they allow you to send email from their network using any email address - some don't allow it and so you might then be forced to use their email addresses which is a problem when you then change ISP.

A few that I have tried and are good are

Aardvaak *great customer support
UKU
PAYGi

However there are plenty of others to have a go at. I've tended to go for the smaller ones as I seem to get better support - got fed up waiting for the big ones to answer emails 3 days after I sent them (if they even ever replied!)

Shinr