Hi Mike,
I too despise the pop ups and have found a handy little program to get rid of these annoying little pests.
You need to be extremely careful, however, when uninstalling any unrecognized programs in your programs list. You might inadvertently uninstall a program you need because you didn't recognize it. Also, programs should always be removed by using the Control Panel's Add or Remove Programs icon, or the program's uninstall utility and never by just highlighting a folder and deleting it.
Anyway, pop ups occur from code written into the web pages you visit and the pop up stoppers disallow those snippets of code to execute. I have been using this free program for years that runs on startup, can be easily turned on or off if you want, and stops all pop up windows from occurring unless you want to allow a window to open (just hold the Shift or Control key down when you click).
You can download this software "Pop-Up Stopper FREE edition" from this page:
http://www.panicware.com/product_downloads.html