Does anyone know what could possibly be causing this? It started happening awhile ago, and I know it's something to do with me because I've visited these pages and viewed the ads perfectly fine with other computers. Basically, any page that uses a Google ad will sit idle for at least 30 seconds (or longer) trying to load the ad (and of course because the ad loads before anything else, nothing else will load in the meantime). Eventually it gives up because it cannot load the ad and the rest of the site loads without the ad. This is extremely annoying since it significantly adds to the page loadtime of any site that has these ads (including these forums) and I have no idea what's causing it nor any idea how to even begin to find out. I've tried going directly to the URL of the ads (http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/ and also the direct link) and all of them wind up doing about the same thing.. I'll sit there trying to load the site for about 30 seconds and then be presented with a "page cannot be displayed" message. I don't have any ad blockers other than the one in IE after XP SP2, unless one of my old ones has somehow left residual traces of itself somewhere (though I have no idea how I would check this). The only firewall I run is Zonealarm which I don't believe is causing it because I've had the problem long before I installed it.. I have no idea what could be causing it. So does anyone have any ideas? The problem has been bugging me awhile but I have no clue how to fix it.
I used to have Norton but I uninstalled it for Zonealarm. I tried to get as much of the lingering pieces as I can (since Semantec is kind of bad with that), though I could have missed something. But like I said, these problems happened before I installed Zonealarm and even with no firewalls enabled it still happens. I don't have a URL because it happens with EVERY Google ad. Doesn't matter which page it's on. It's happening with the one in these forums.
Nothing but Internet Explorer's (from SP2). I *used* to have some ad blocking stuff but I got rid of it all. It's possible some code from that is lying around somewhere but I have no idea how to check.