I use Firefox but can't access TechSpot from there - the page won't load saying it is waiting for ad.doubleclick.com. For whatever reason, IE works. What's up with the ad stuff? I have doubleclick blocked - why does this site require it?

This site does not require loading doubleclick code but that's what our ad server runs and thus gets called much of the time. While we don't particularly recommend or like that our members block our advertising for obvious reasons, blocking the doubleclick domain alone should not result in the whole site not loading.

That said, because this is a configuration problem unique to you given the browser configuration and domain blocking, there is little or nothing we can do to help from our end. Hope the explanation helps for figuring out a more proper config.

So what is your recommendation for a configuration?
Allow ad.doubleclick? disable Webroot spysweeper? use IE instead of FF?

Allowing it would be best, since you're not going to find viruses on this site (God be willing someone with one spread them ). Also make sure that you're not on any web blocks, and that you keep techspot in your list of websites that allows scripts to run and popups to pop up (we don't have popups usually except for pm's).

On my homepage (not T.S.) a site that frequently gets referenced (and stalls the browser waiting for it) is as.casalemedia.com.

I've grown tired waiting for that server and hence added it to my HOST file
as 127.0.0.1 as.casalemedia.com

Moving scripts to the end of the HTML file could help, as the browser would display the actual page content first.

We run scripts at the end of the page whenever possible. Ad code has to be run inline with the rest of the page however.

As part of our upcoming redesign we will move on to an XML standards compliant code base which will be helpful for load times among a number of other things, but in this case the source of the problem is not us but the user's custom configuration.