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As the title says. I'm not an RPG player but I hear both names floating around (hell, my favourite band, Burzum, released an album that had an album cover that ripped off an AD&D rulebook cover!)

2nd ed was called "Advanced" to differentiate it from the 1st edition, simply named "Dungeons&Dragons", the races are refined (1st ed, Dwarf, Elf and Halffling were classes, the fighter/wizard/thief/cleric were human only.), classes are added and new monsters/spells/rules.

Well...

D&D actually became AD&D with 1st Edition AD&D back in the late 70's.

I think it was made to differentiate it from D&D due some brewing legal/ownership issues.

Here's an interesting link to read about the various incarnation of D&D:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons#Edition_history

Having said that, I don't think we need 2 threads to discuss this, so...

There is no "Standard" D&D to compare AD&D against. Three years after the original game came out, TSR published two subsequent versions of the game simultaneously. "Basic/Expert" (B/X) by Holmes and Moldvay was a rules-lite style game that focused more on rulings rather than rules. AD&D by Gygax was the opposite,although not so rules-heavy as the Third and Fourth editions of the game published by Wizards of the Coast decades later. What I mean by "rulings rather than rules" is that B/X requires the players to do more interpretation of the rules on the fly or making up house rules. In contrast, AD&D and its successors (up through 4E) is more about looking up rules written by the company.