Thanks for all the advice.  Have tried all  suggestions except for Chris' and will do that next.  Everything claims to have found and fixed thousands of errors, and may have negligible effect, but it doesn't last more than an hour or two at most.  The various software scans claim security is just dandy.  IE is set on "internet."

 As I mentioned, when using FireFox, there's a small window in the lower left corner running whenever is loading from a site I've clicked on, for example, www.zerohedge.com, that says "Transferring data from..." and then sequentially states whatever is loading.  

  Most of those go by too fast to read but here's a sampling of the ones I could catch since they apparently take long enough to load that I can write them down:

ec.atdmt.com
uac.advertising.com
a.tribalfusion.com
cm.g.doubleclick.net
s.amazon.
tag.admeld.com
lj.d.chango.com
in.getclicky.com

  What the @%^#$^ are those and why are they loading???  Oh, the page I selected will usually load a little bit--just the first page of it that can be read with no scrolling--and when the extras finally all get loaded, only then does it finish with the page I clicked on and say, in this example, "Transferring data from zerohedge.com.  It can take up to 20 minutes!

  I'd sure be embarrassed if there's just some Windows setting I'm missing.  <sigh>

Again, thanks for the help and ideas.  Stetts