For a while now I’ve found that certain websites consistently crash when viewing them with Internet Explorer 8.

The page starts to load and then the following message pops up (Operation aborted):

 

image

 

As soon as you hit OK, the page content then disappears:

 

image

 

Initially I thought this must be either a bug with IE or maybe my Anti-Virus software.   Searching on Google for the error leads to a Knowledgebase article which explains about an error condition which is now fixed in IE8. 

Knowledgebase article KB927917

According to the article, the error was removed from IE8 which instead now reports the problem in the bottom left of the window.  This obviously isn’t the case as you can see from the above screenshot!!

So – more Google searching lead to the following thread on the Adsense support forums:

 

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=4d928e1f84ae2211&hl=en

http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=5b99e3565c8f5bfb&hl=en

 

Could this be the problem I’m seeing?   To prove it, I decided to block the ads from loading by altering my hosts file.  

I redirected pagead2.googlesyndication.com to the loopback address and what do you know – the page loads!!

I’m not sure how widespread this is or if there are any specific conditions needed to reproduce the error (I’ve seen this on several PCs), but it might be worth looking at the bounce rate for UE users in your Analytics!