AOL shares pushed higher today than they have been since its November spinoff, rising almost four percent to close at $27.44.

And the reason for the rise? One savvy investor suggested it was due to yesterday’s announcement that the company might shut down Bebo, the social networking site it egregiously overpaid for in 2008–$850 million in cash–only to see the asset dwindle badly.

Rather than finding a buyer, said the investor, a shutdown might allow AOL (AOL) to write down some of that acquisition, yielding it hundreds of millions of dollars in tax savings.

AOL bought Bebo in 2008, when it was still a Time Warner (TWX) division.

In addition, AOL is in the midst of selling off its ICQ instant-messaging business–likely to foreign buyers, in one of the slowest transactions ever. Once that deal is done, it could nab the company upward of $100 million to $150 million in cash.

With its current cash flow, that could give CEO Tim Armstrong a nice pile of dough, which could be further supplemented as he gears up for negotiations over a new deal for AOL’s search business with both Google (GOOG)–its current partner–and Microsoft (MSFT).

While the big-money guarantees are likely a thing of the past, AOL’s business–unlike, say, MySpace’s–is considered valuable by both companies. The current Google deal is up in December.

In any case, while the failure of translating its Bebo acquisition into any kind of success is pretty clear, perhaps the complete disaster does have some silver lining.

The global PC market will suffer a rare decline this year with shipments expected to slip four percent to 287.3 million units in 2009, from 299.2 million in 2008 (click on chart to enlarge). Not since the dot-com bust of 2001 have PC sales been so slow or their outlook so grim, says iSuppli, the research outfit charting the market’s collapse.

“An annual decline in unit shipments is highly unusual in the PC market,” says Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, for iSuppli. “Even in weak years, PC unit shipments typically rise by single-digit percentages. The last decline–in 2001–was a 5.1 decrease in unit shipments due to the extraordinary impact of the Dot-Com bust, which caused inflated IT spending levels from the previous years to collapse.”

Driving the gloomy forecast this time around: The econalypse, of course, but also, dwindling demand for desktop computers. iSuppli expects an 18.1 percent drop in desktop shipments, from 151.9 million in 2008 to 124.4 million in 2009.

Grim, I know. Still, there is a bit of good news in the report. Notebook PC shipments will rise 11.7 percent to 155.97 million units in in 2009, exceeding desktop shipments for the first time ever.

No area of technology will be immune to the decline. Hardest hit: the computer hardware sector, which is expected to see spending fall 15 percent to $324.3 billion. Seems even the promise of government stimulus packages won’t be enough to offset this ugly near-term outlook. Said Gordon, “Economic conditions have continued to erode business confidence in all regions. There is a continued general sense of uncertainty in the market and a lack of clarity of actual amount of toxic debt out there. IT organizations will look for ways to shift spending from capital expenditures to operational efficiencies.”

The last time the unemployment rate was this high was in July 2004, following the dotcom bust. Seems even the high-tech world is becoming more fiscally cautious as the economy crumbles around us. We’ve seen layoffs at Yahoo (YHOO), Motorola (MOT), Applied Materials (AMAT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Sun (JAVA), Nortel (NT) … even Google (GOOG), which announced the first major cuts in its 10-year history.

What was it Mark Twain once said? “By the Law of Periodical Repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again and again–and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s, and each obeying its own law.”