After more investigation I found this: Casale Media is a tracking cookie that monitors your Internet activity and gathers your personal information as you surf the web. This information may be retrieved by the parent company, without your consent. It came from this site and they have instructions on how to remove it: http://labs.paretologic.com/spyware.aspx?r...emedia%20cookie Now, to update your hosts file. Find it at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts has no extension. It is your internal DNS server whcih you can use to point any site to any address. In this case, the extra line will cause requests for casalemedia ads to be directed back to your own computer - therefore returning nothing and saving you some bandwidth. For example if you want to get rid of google ads, just add this to your hosts file: 127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com and all google ads will be gone - it even removes the space that the ads took up.