There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.
If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.
Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.
The Staff of SOH
When I said "original" I meant my original boxed Gold Edition install with SP1, SP2, and Acceleration so I'm OK there.
After all the troubleshooting, moving folders, and uninstall/reinstall of Java and Microsoft.NET 4, it turned out that my Avast Free antivirus program was blocking AICarriers.NET from connecting to FSX manually or at start-up via the exe.xml file. That has never happened before. I uninstalled Avast and went back to AVG and now AICarriers is working as it should. My only problem now is I accidentally deleted my good aicarriers.cfg file when I first encountered the problem last week but it's just a housekeeping task to rebuild it. Many thanks to Frank, Cees, Rob, and Seahawk72s for your assistance and suggestions. 
Well, I finally found the problem!
It was a new one to me as well. And earlier in my troubleshooting I had entered an "exception" in Avast specifically for AICarriers. Either I did it wrong or Avast ignored it for some reason, I don't know which. Anyway I'm back in the Tailhook Navy! And thanks again.