[Perfesser]

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in the forum so I'll put it in 'Tips and tricks'. I've used this successfully since February and it DOES cut the number of popups, tracking cookies, and especially those annoying 'flasher' banners (like hit the monkey and win).

Only downside is that on occasion my wife will try to enter a contest and hit one of the sites...I figure that if they are routing through one of these sites the contest isn't worth the effort, more likely it's just an address collector.

You get blank spots or 'page cannot be displayed' where the ad was; most popups either open blank or stay down on the taskbar; I haven't encountered any 'popup storms' but I don't visit the kind of sites that do that....and the number of spy cookies that AdAware or Spybot finds goes WAAAY down.

to cut down on the number of popups, tracking cookies, banner ads, and other junk, add the offending site to the ' Restricted' zone' in IE.

This is a good list to start with:

Link to IE-Spyad page

http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ehowes/resource.htm#IESPYAD

Link to direct download of the file:

http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ehowes/res/ie-spyad.zip

The spyad.zip creates a registry file you merge into the registry.
I run AdAware regularly and when tracking cookies show up from new sites I add them manually to the restricted list.

The sites are found in the registry at:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\

[GoJoAGoGo]

Perfesser:

Thanks for the link ...