All I can think is it might be HOSTS or internal in your browser. Sometimes I can search MetaCrawler and click a link to open in a new tab and it wont. But if I copy the URL without "metacrawler's" redirect info, it will load. Otherwise I consider it bad coding or even malicious and rather happy it won't load (then again I am not the smartest but fairly street-smart in the browsing realm).
As for the toolbar, I don't (can't) use it; but I use Tarla's link.
http://vsiupdate.neopets.com/toolbar/al ... lientguid={38278640-38ED-4FCD-B0F0-21625E5DB433} (don't know why link breaks, but that is it)
It has been fixed, as far as I know, and the 'new' direct link to it works since I got something from Tarla the other day, after many days of the timing issue. Perhaps downloading and/or reinstalling the most current version of it might help?