Everytime I open Safari it downloads a series of blank.aspx files into my downloads folder. Anyone having the same problem?

For what it's worth...

I work for a largely Mac based organization. I have been flooded with support calls related to these .aspx files over the last few days. Today, I grabbed a folder full of the files and started investigating them.

As it turns out, Safari does a nice job tagging files it downloads with extended attributes. This is done as part of Mac OSX's built-in malware prevention system http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3662. The wherefrom data can be viewed from the Finder in the Get Info window for any of the .aspx files you have downloaded.

At least in my case, every single .aspx file was coming from the same source (ads.pointroll.com).

Again, in my case, these files were generated by a flaky ad server hosted by PointRoll. I contacted PointRoll support and, to their credit, got an immediate response.

"Thank you for contacting PointRoll. This is actually a known issue and Support/DEV are working on it.

More information to follow…

Melissa Sutton Boos

Manager, Technical Operations Support"

In my case, this is affecting Mac OSX 10.6.8 with Safari 5.1.2. It is not affecting Mac OSX 10.7.x with Safari 5.1.2, or browsers other than Safari (e.g. Chrome, Firefox...etc). Also, it may not be affecting older versions of Safari (I could only reproduce the problem in Safari 5.1.2 on 10.6.8).

Hope this helps, and I hope PointRoll fixes the problem soon. In the meantime, I have been installing the AdBlock extension on client computers.

I just checked my test machine. Looks like the PointRoll ad server is still borked. In the case of the test site I'm hitting, they use several ad providers. It may take several reloads to hit an ad porvided by PointRoll.

If you like, you can open the Activity window in Safari (Window - Activity) to view where each component of the page is loading from. It'll look someting like this if you hit a few pointroll ads...

Or quit Safari and then shift-click the dock icon to restart it with no pre-existing windows open. This should eliminate the downloading window, unless your home page automatically tries to download something.

Matt

I'm seeing this same issue when accessing certain web sites but carolyn suggested fix did not work for me. I can replicate the issue byt going to either the Mac Rumors or 9 to 5 Mac web sites. The files, about 75 of them, seem to be 'downloaded' along with the advertisments on the page...

Any other ideas?

SImon

This issue just started happening for me as well in the last day or so. I tried the solution above, but it did not fix this issue. This was occurring for me on Yahoo Fantasy Football and on IMDB.

I am uncertain as to why this is happening. It appears to be trying to launch Citrix.

I see the same problem with Safari 5.0.5 - not Firefox. See it on various websites with ~10-20 blank.aspx files downloaded each time I refresh the page.

Tried Carolyn's fix - no joy.

New bug in Safari?

I am having the same problem when opening Safari. This seems to be happening ONLY on my homepage, no matter what I set the homepage to be. My downloads window opens and I get a handful of these blank-1.aspx, blank-2.aspx, etc.. downloading. Fixes above have not worked for me. This problem only started in the last couple of days. It had never occurred before. Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm running Safari 5.1.2.

I am having the same problem with Safari 5.1.2 on OS X 10.6.8. The website I use to reproduce it consistently is imdb.com. When I click a featured trailer on the front page, it opens the trailer plus it downloads 9 blank.aspx files. Carolyn's steps did not fix the problem for me.

The blank.aspx files are all 0 bytes.

It seems to be from ad banners on some sites, they are poorly coded and throw blank.aspx files at you. Whoever the ad vendor is should fix this, but who knows if they know/care.

I've installed the AdBlock extension in Safari and it seems to do the trick. You can either just turn it on, or only have it filter out ads from certain sites (IMDB, ESPN, Gawker, etc)

I'll occasionally turn off adblock in the coming days to see if the ads have been fixed, or if it's still happening

Has there been a fix for this yet? I am downloading close to 150 blank aspx files every 15 minutes. I have tried the fix from Carolyn Samit and the AdBlock seems to be working thus far, but when it is not working it launches Adobe Dreamweaver. Which is going berzerker.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks to all on this community.

Thank you. I didn't know OS X tagged downloaded files with their source. I suspected it was an ad server causing the problem, but I didn't think it would be so easy to debug. This should be the definitive answer for the thread.

Carolyn / Apple et al

I have the same problem. Followed your fix and it does not work. For example, the nytimes.com downloads 29 blank-aspx files when you visit the front page. This problem just started appearing within the last two weeks.

I think it is time APPLE + SAFARI specialists take a hard look at this and not leave it to the "community."

Any suggestions or fixes would be sincerely appreciated!

Thanks to all.

Apple Records

I just heard from a support person at PointRoll. They have a solution to their server side issue that is causing .aspx files to be downloaded to some Safari clients. I was informed that they will be rolling this solution out to their ad servers and that occurrences of this should decrease until all of their ad servers are updated. Once that is done, this will become a non-issue.

On a side note, all negative connotations of ad companies aside, in my opinion PointRoll did a great job quickly responding to what appears to have been a relatively isolated issue with their servers. Kudos to Melissa and their support/tech staff.

Go to ~/Library/Safari

Move these files to the Trash.

Downloads.plist

History.plist

LastSession.plist

Restart your Mac, try Safari.