My IE has been freezing when bringing up various web pages. Why? It's frozen while initializing a Flash-based ad. Maybe it's a recent update to Flash that's caused this lack of responsiveness, but I finally had enough and downloaded the ad unfriendly host file to two of my home computers: Eric'o'theque!: Ad unfriendly hosts file .

Everything is so much better now. Sure, I have embedded frames with 404 messages cluttering my web pages here and there, but I'll take that over an embedded ad or, worse, a dorky Flash ad that was gumming up my browser's responsiveness.

In the past, I've disabled Flash entirely, but you know how long that lasts until you really need to reenable Flash to view some content.

So: the ad unfriendly hosts file is highly recommended.