The "brings my system to a crawl" problem was one I experienced with several other ad-blocker and popup-killer programs. It is the reason I stopped using most of them.

So far, AdShield hasn't presented me with any performance problems yet, one reason I've stuck with it for so long.

Hey Tony;

Could you send me your blocked list. Your shameless endorsement of AdShield has made me download it and I don't want to re-invent the wheel (or maybe I'm just too lazy. )

My one gripe with AdShield, and the reason I disabled it, is that if you have a certain site, URL, etc. that is in your "bad list" and there are "good" links and/or popups coming from those sites, I haven't found a way to tell which filter/URL/server string has caused those to be blocked. Like, let's say I am taking one of the canned lists that people have, but one of those filters is filtering out something I don't want filtered. How can I tell which is the offending entry?

PopUp Killer had a nice "log" feature that showed you which filters have been triggered, which made it easy to go get rid of a bad one. I couldn't figure out how to fix this on AdShield.

I haven't found a way to tell which filter/URL/server string has caused those to be blocked.

Good point, I noticed this as a shortcoming as well. However, I haven't yet had trouble identifying problems. All I do is look at the page source of the "good" page, locate the URL string of what they were trying to load, infer from it what the blocker list is likely to have contained, and BOOM there it is, easily found in the blocker list.

I think I'll email the creator of AdShield and see if he's got an idea on how to improve it in this area.

Could you send me your blocked list.

I just use the one linked from here:

http://www.morelerbe.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum;f=52

And then modify it to my particular needs.

I haven't found a way to tell which filter/URL/server string has caused those to be blocked.

Okay, I emailed him. We'll see what he says about it. My suggestion was...

- First things first: Make the block-list searchable by substring. This will simplify digging up entries when you have to resort to manual labor in this case. Right now, I have to scroll through the whole block list to locate an entry. Because the list sometimes starts with a . or a /, I can't just go alphabetically.

- Second thing: Maintain an internal, volatile, in-memory-only list of all the recent URLs and popups that were blocked. Doesn't even have to be a big list, it can be just a dozen entries long. When I surf to a "good" page that doesn't work because of AdShield, I can call up this list of things that recently got blocked. From there, each item in the list should have a button or link so I can directly reach the block-list-item that was responsible for the block and edit/delete it accordingly.

well, ive browsed the boards for about a week now and this will be my 1st post. soon i shall have a 60GB rio!

anyways, i've tried all the ones mentioned in this thread except for popupcop but it sounds cool.

i've been using what i think is the best: ZeroPopup. it runs whenever IE is launched and kills ALL popups. close IE and it closes too. if you see that you're on a site that clearly uses popups to navigate, just press F10 and it gets disabled. then use the same key to re-enable it. it also displays a tray icon to select options and such. it now has a better 2.0 version but its not supposed to be free

ZeroPopup was one of the packages I tried for a while. It gave me problems, so I had to stop using it. If I recall correctly, it was performance and lockup problems. I open and close a LOT of web browser windows, and ZeroPopup would only tolerate me doing that a certain number of times before it killed itself and my browser along with it.