I have been playing with this problem for a couple of months now. As reported in another thread here, I determined the problem is definitely Google Toolbar related (makes no difference what version of the toolbar). Therefore, I unloaded the toolbar in favor of the additional security provided by SD Helper. After a couple of weeks, to my complete dismay, I discovered, according to its own performance statistics, SD Helper was doing NOTHING. It occurred to me that I am also running SpywareBlaster (it is free and used to be recommended by Spybot S&D). It appears that when one is using SpywareBlaster, SD Helper is completely unnecessary and ineffective. Additionally, SpywareBlaster has no negative effects on Google Toolbar.