Could one of you kind souls who's machine does not lock up and crash every time that damn punch the freakin' monkey banner ad comes up please give me the URL of where the Banner is SUPPOSED to take you. I intend to find out who offers this banner and let them know how bad it is crashing 4 machines that I have access to.... and ask them to change it. I can't go thru another weekend of having to reboot my machine 11 times because of it. :( Thanks, Bill

Can't help with the URL, but maybe I can help with the problem. I haven't seen that ad, probably because I have all my browser's Active-X support disabled. As far as I can tell, Active-X is used mostly to: 1) Create the most incredibly annoying advertising 2) Put viruses on your system I'm using IE5, and I disabled Active-X by going into Tools -> Internet Options -> Security I cranked my security to the highest setting, then I used the CUSTOM button to access the options to tighten it even further. BTW, Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced has an option for turning off animations. That makes all but the Active-X and scripted garbage stand still. Note that these settings make some web pages unusable. However, I think those pages are just trash anyway. Jude

It ain't an ActiveX control, it's JavaScript and the URL is http://www.treeloot.com/punchit/index.html.

That's interesting, I didn't know you could crash a system with a Java script. Anyway, I turned that off too. Jude

ecockrell... Thanks for taking the time. I've contacted them as promised and await their response. Jude... I hear what you are saying and appreciate the suggestion, but in our business we have to be able to use the capabilities of our systems and I feel it's important to let people know that their crappy code is creating problems. Maybe we can clean up this developing mess we call the Net, if we all let people receive feedback instead of disabling all of our great capabilities just to get around. Thanks, Bill BBay.com

Good luck cleaning up the mess. I think somewhere along the way we got off the track. I believe that good presentation can make the content more effective. Somehow, that truth has mutated into a belief that presentation is a good substitute for content, and if you have enough presentation you don't need any content at all. I don't always run with my browser lobotomized; IE5 permits me to promote specific sites to higher "trust" levels, and I do this for sites that I find have worthy content and a minimum of animated advertising. Jude

maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't think those monkey people (yes, I think that's an accurate description of them) really care if you have problems or not. For every one person like billbay there are fifty that can see it fine (even if it does lag their page loading which, again, they probably don't really care about) So if this new type of banner makes even one in fifty people click on it that wouldn't have otherwise, they have justified billbay having problems. really, let's face it, a banner advert with a kind of "game" is much more likely to get clicked on, I've found my brother playing "punch the money" a few times, he never does that with other banners. So maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but I don't think they'll put their own interests behind billbays request to make it work better on low-end machines. frankly I don't think they'll care much at all. As you can see I've got a very low opinion of "corporations" - if it was an individual running the banner ads I'd probably be thinking differently SewerRat

The problem is Java lads, not activex ...

The depressing part of this whole thing is that it is not just effecting low end machines, unless of course you include PII MMX 128Mram machines running Win98 less than a year old... which responds the same to this freakin' ad as the 486 DX133 with 96Mram. You are all right, it won't make a rat's ass to anybody but me... but I am willing to try and make just one dent in the mess if possible :) I'm trying to think of this as a webmaster would like to know that his page is crashing their visitors machine... who knows, there may even be a reply... we shall see.

OK, I know those advert banners are needed to pay for running the site that hosts this forum. But there are limits. Another blasted turdid thing that at least one ad banner does is to set a date somewhere in order to sabotage the user's net page viewer's cacheing mechanism :: it admitted so directly in a Java comment :: and we need the cacheing mechanism to work so that if I go from page A to page B, and then back to page A by clicking the "back" button. I want page A to come back on screen at once, not to have to wait an age and a snail while it reloads at dialup line speed, also adding to my phone bill. - I have Netscape 4 here at work, and on it the click-the-monkey banner displays OK, although I have never tried to click it, I have better things to do.

I wonder what fraction of "Punch the Monkey" clicks are from kids - who probably don't have credit cards. Jude

jude: the punch the monkey people make their money in turn from showing banner adverts so they don't care who clicks on it, or how interested the people are in what they are doing, they just want "hits" SewerRat

What a wacky way to do things. They don't care how much they annoy us, and they get paid whether or not they produce real sales results for the companies that pay them. That's almost as bad as the yarn in "Catch-22" about the farmer who collected money from the government for not growing certain crops, and then using the money to buy more land so he could not grow even more and collect more government money for not growing. Jude

Jude, that Catch 22 story isn't a yarn. It's true. The US government calls it a "Land Bank". I work with people that own farmland in another state, and the government pays them to not grow crops on it.

Whoops, I was careless in my statement. Whether it's true or not, the Catch-22 story is a good illustration of the idea that one can make money without actually creating anything of value.

Jude, your point was well taken, I just wanted to let you know that it was more than just a story.

I believe you. It's not really surprising. Throughout history, governments have suffered from chronic recto-cranial inversion.

Java itself isn't really the problem, it's usually the particular web browser's implementation of it. Netscape is fairly mild, it's only needed four patches for Java security holes this year. IE has needed about 4 times that. If all the Java does is crash your system, you're getting away easy. Some Java traps can eat the system. Now, don't get me started on Active X. Ciao! Joe.

Well Wiz, you're not alone. I'd rather walk through the rough section of town with a "Kick me" sign on my butt than enable Active-X