Thanks for your response - no, the popup blocker in IE didn't help even when
set to high - however, I managed to fix the problem by re-setting my IE 7
security settings back to "medium -high" , without any additional tweaking
of these settings by me. Obviously I had set a single security setting in IE to
alert me to these intrusions. I need to go back to IE and try to reproduce the
problem to see which setting it was. On the down side - I am no longer
being alerted to these things.
I have done some reading and this seems to be a pervasive problem
on the internet when surfing. There are a number of sites called
adservers, a common example is "doubleclick", which are causing the
problem of popup alerts, or are slowing down people's surfing. My
main problem is with the yieldmanager adserver due to its presence
on the Yahoo mail sites.
The only viable solution I have seen for blocking these things involves editing
the hosts file in order to point these servers to 127.0.0.1. There is an interesting
discussion of the problem here: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
worth reading. There are also a number of freewares and sharewares floating around
which purport to do this for you and keep updated adserver lists.
The jury seems to be out on whether these adservers are of any harm,
or worth blocking at all - I may try it to see if my surfing speeds up.
Some offer an opt-out cookie, but you have to enable third-party
cookies for that to work, I think.
Hope this helps some folks who have been having the same problem...
Cathy
