This is driving me freakin' insane. Beyond navigating my computer and using the web, I know nothing about computers so please bear with me and I'll try to explain the best I can.
This started happening about two weeks ago. There's a cooking forum that I belong to and on most pages there are little paragraph ads from Google on the right side of the page. They automatically generate based on the subject matter (much like the same ads do on a page of search results on Googles site). Say if I'm reading a thread about herbs than the ads might be for spice companies. I hardly ever even gave them a thought, they were just there.
Now, my problem. Suddenly, when I go to a new page, the page loads fine but I can't use the page or even scroll it until a fucking "file download" box for the Google ads gets done loading. This can take a minute or more to happen everytime I click to go to another page. When they used to be there automatically (the ads), now my computer is asking me to download them (I think).
What comes up is a typical grey Windows "file download" box and in the "from" line it says "pagead2.googlesyndication.com". Whether I hit open, save or cancel, nothing happens, the ads don't show up but I can then (finally) use the page I am on. This is pissing me off so badly, it is making moving around the site next to impossible because of the long wait on every page for the "file download" box to load. The site admin. say it's not a problem on thier end. Yesterday on another forum I go to that has Google ads, the same damn thing happened on thier site too
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Can anyone tell me how to stop this from happening? Is it possibly something in IE I can fix? A way maybe to block downloads from that Google address? I didn't do a thing to my settings when this started happening, one day I'm cruising the site as normal and the next this download crap started.
Please someone give me some ideas! I now can't use two of my favorite sites and lord knows how many others until this is fixed. I'm so pissed at Google (though it might not be thier fault) because I use thier site all the time and now they're a pain in my ass. Thanks to anyone who can help me!
BTW: I'm using IE 6.0 and Windows 98.
Ali