Hmmm...that's probably because AOLserver 3.4 has its own set of solutions to the charset problem which differs from AOLserver 3.2+aD12.

Someone should investigate, but I'd put this at a low priority.  AOLserver 3.2+ aD12 is known to be stable and the major memory leak issue goes away if you set minthreads=maxthreads, which AOLserver recommends one do anyway (at least that's what they do at aol.com and digitalcity.com).