Internet Explorer hanging with SD Helper

[meelymonster]

Hi, I'm new to this forum, and hoping to find the cause to a strange little phenomenon I'm seeing. I tried searching the forum for a previous post on this and did not find one -- forgive me if I'm revisiting well-trodden ground.

I installed Spybot a couple weeks ago. I activated both resident features -- the TeaTimer and the SD Helper (or "IE helper"). They are both checked under the Tools/Resident menu in the Advanced section of the Spybot program. I did not use the Immunize feature.

The program seems to be working fine, except for one odd thing. On some web pages, the entire page will load except for some ad, which will remain blank. That makes sense -- it's being blocked by SD Resident. I've confirmed this by turning on the "Display dialog when blocking" option, and I do indeed get a notification of a bad URL being blocked. The weird part is, that the page never stops trying to load. On the bottom of the IE window is the message "Waiting for... " and the green progress bar, and it stays that way for as long as the window is open. No "Done" message. It doesn't really affect my usage of the page, to my knowledge, since the rest of the page is loaded in its entirety. But I'm concerned that the continuous page-hanging could be eating up my bandwidth or my computer processes.

When I deactivate the "SD Helper", reboot the computer, and revisit the web page, the problem doesn't occur, which seems to isolate the problem as something related to SD Helper.

One example of where it happens: I'm on news.yahoo.com, the whole page loads except for a small ad on the righthand side, and the page keeps waiting. When I activate the "Display dialog" option, the bad URL is listed as http://ad.yieldmanager.com/...... (it goes on for awhile) and is identified as "TagASaurus".

I'd really appreciate your feedback on this. Are other people seeing this same phenomenon? Is there a way to stop it? Should I be concerned about problems it could cause? I'm on an XP system with IE7. I have McAfee Security Center and AdAware (the free version, so no resident component active) in addition to the Spybot.

Oh, and one solution I explored: I noticed that when the problem happened, the Phishing Filter icon on the bottom of the IE window also seemed to be working interminably. I considered that the problem might be a conflict between SD Helper and IE Phishing Filter so I disabled Phishing Filter, rebooted, and revisited the web page, but the problem remained.

[md usa spybot fan]

meelymonster:

If I understand your post correctly, there may be an alternative to disabling "SDHelper" or not having your Yahoo news pages display properly.

To stop "SDHelper" from blocking the Blacklisted URL http://ad.yieldmanager.com/ identified as "TagASaurus":

• Go into Internet Explorer > Tools > and select "Spybot – Search Destroy Configuration".
• In the "Spybot-S&D - Configuration" window in the "Settings" tab under "When encountering bad things" there are three options:
  options:
  • Block all pages silently
  • Display dialog when blocking
  • Ask for blocking confirmation
  
  Instead of selecting "Display dialog when blocking" as I understand you did, select "Ask for blocking confirmation" and click "OK".
• Exit Internet Explorer and restart it.

When you encounter a URL that would ordinarily just be blocked either in "Block all pages silently" or "Display dialog when blocking" mode, Spybot will issue a "Spybot-S&D Bad URL Blocker" dialog. The dialog allows you to either "Allow" or "Deny" the access and also to select among the following options:

• Ask me again next time
• Remember for this session
• Always react this way

When you encounter the blacklisted URL http://ad.yieldmanager.com/ identified as "TagASaurus", select "Always react this way" and then "Allow" the access.

[129260]

You said yourself it's not doing anything wrong....so i don't understand why you think it's a problem? Sry, i don't understand what you mean. No, its not eating your bandwidth, ie cant load it because spybot is blocking the ad. so ie will just stop and say loading....because its waiting for a response from the ad, but since it is being blocked, that response is never received, therefor, ie things the page isn't done loading.
I dont use ie, i use firefox. The only option i could think of to fix the issue would be to block all bad pages silently, found by right clicking teatimer, resident, then clicking block all bad pages silently. That might help but I'm not sure.

"When I deactivate the "SD Helper", reboot the computer, and revisit the web page, the problem doesn't occur, which seems to isolate the problem as something related to SD Helper."

It finishes loading because spybot resident is no longer blocking bad pages. therefor, the issue doesn't occur, and the ad loads, so everything has sent a reply back to ie, and ie knows it finished loading the page.
md spybot fan offer is the best i think.

hope that helps!

[meelymonster]

Thanks guys, appreciate the info.

I'm very new to using anti-spyware, so my question was more of a "can you help me categorize this as a problem or not" kind of thing. I wanted to see if my system was doing something very unusual, thus signaling a problem I otherwise wouldn't notice. So, following up from what you've suggested md usa...

1) To what extent would you say this phenomenon (of the unending IE page hang) is common/expected with SD Resident? Have you heard of it before? Has it happened to you?

2) I really appreciate your suggestion and I can see how it will solve my problem (assuming that this particular bad URL is the culprit most/all of the time). I'm presuming that the risk/danger of allowing one bad URL to load up freely on my system is not a big deal? (I'm guessing it's not, given that prior to recently I was doing nothing to block any URL at all!)

Thank you for your help!

[129260]

Thanks guys, appreciate the info.

I'm very new to using anti-spyware, so my question was more of a "can you help me categorize this as a problem or not" kind of thing. I wanted to see if my system was doing something very unusual, thus signaling a problem I otherwise wouldn't notice. So, following up from what you've suggested md usa...

1) To what extent would you say this phenomenon (of the unending IE page hang) is common/expected with SD Resident? Have you heard of it before? Has it happened to you?

2) I really appreciate your suggestion and I can see how it will solve my problem (assuming that this particular bad URL is the culprit most/all of the time). I'm presuming that the risk/danger of allowing one bad URL to load up freely on my system is not a big deal? (I'm guessing it's not, given that prior to recently I was doing nothing to block any URL at all!)

Thank you for your help!

to answer number 1.) I use firefox, but however i haven't noticed this behavior on my machines, but thats probably because i only use Internet explorer for windows update.
2.) no its not a big deal at all if you never had probs with the url before
3.) your welcome