Are you here because you've been getting really annoying "pop-up" dialogs asking for a userid and password? If so, sorry about that.
April 15th Update: Christopher Lemons has reported that this is not an Alexa issue. (See below.)
The ie7pro.com folks have created a problem that has gotten too big to ignore. If you can disable/uninstall the ie7pro.com plugin (see below), we believe the problem should go away. Failing that, the password pop-ups are only configured to occur every other hour, so if you wait an hour they should disappear (for an hour). They are there because we are trying to pressure the authors of the plugin to quit freeloading off of our website (stealing our bandwidth and CPU power).
I had expected them to be responsible and fix this issue promptly, but that was over a month ago :(
In brief, the problem is that we're getting over 400,000 requests per day on the http://baremetal.com/cgi-bin/dnsip page from web browsers identifying themselves as having the Alex Toolbar installed. This is a CGI script, and while it doesn't consume _much_ CPU time, when it's being hit hundreds of thousands of times a day, it adds up. Part of what is really stupid about this whole thing is that the functionality they are gaining is a trivial: just a forward and reverse DNS lookup. They could re-impliment it in the plugin in 10 minutes :(
Please note that this lookup process seems to log your IP address and the name of every site you visit in our webserver logs :(
-Tom Brown, April 15th, 2007. support @ this website.
Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 14:13:32 -0400
From: Christopher Lemons
To: support@baremetal.com
Subject: Pop-up Solution
The pop-up problem is being caused by by a IE browser helper object called "IE7Pro". If you instruct people to open the pref section select the "plugins" section and disable the Alexa rank, and server look-up options it should cure the problem.
The website for the BHO is http://www.ie7pro.com/
The "official" IE7Pro uninstall instructions seem to be http://wiki.ie7pro.com/index.php/Uninstall_IE7Pro.
Also note the ie7pro.com wiki.