Strange Problem With Download.com

[purplespider]

For quite a while now when I go to http://www.download.com on my laptop it looks like this: http://www.pswd.biz/downloadcomproblem.gif - Nearly all the images do not load and the CSS stylesheet appears to not be loaded. The page loads perfectly on my PC so I did some investigating (here comes detective purplespider again!)

 

I discovered that the images which did not load and the CSS stylesheet which didn't load were located at http://i.i.com.com which seems a strange address but I then worked out by going to http://www.com.com that cnet owns www.com.com.

 

If I go to http://i.i.com.com it rather bizzarly points to the root dir of my Apache web sever which I have running. So does http://adlog.com.com which seems to be a subdomain that cnet uses for adverts.

 

This happens in both Firefox, Mozilla and IE.

 

I've tried turning the web server service off but then I just get a "The page cannot be displayed" when trying i.i.com.com

 

So has anyone got any ideas why this is happening?? I can't figure it out!!

 

Cheers

James

[MikeJ]

Sounds like you installed an adblocker, or changed your hosts file to block ads on your notebook.

 

It's a fairly common practice to redefine ad serving hosts to point to your local machine so that ads don't display, and the behaviour you are seeing suggests that.

[purplespider]

Ahh perfect, thanks Mike.

 

I checked in my hosts file and those domains were listed, must have been put there by Webroot SpySweeper.

 

Cheers

James