about:blank problem

[redrum]

Hello,

I have been running some scripts that pull up websites and put data in a spreadsheet for several months. Now, all of a sudden, the scripts get slowed down because they stop and wait for many seconds waiting for "about:blank". This initially caused my Internet Explorer to display a message asking if I wanted to continue running the script - which caused problems because I was not there to answer. I fixed this by reconfiguring Explorer. However, the "Waiting for about:blank" messege in the bottom status window still displays for several seconds (up to 15-20seconds) slowing down my script drastically.

I have no idea what is going on with this. I have searced the internet and found that there are some brouser hijackers, but I have no issues just using my IE for browsing websites. I have searched the Forums and can't find any reference to this issue.

I would really appreciate some direction to solving this - hoping someone else has run into this!

Regards,

Doug