Is there ANYONE out there who actually has a positive thought about pop-up ads? I detest them, and I make a special point to avoid advertisers who use them. Thanks to my longtime pal Woody Leonhard, I can now recommend a great pop-up blocker for anyone who uses Internet Explorer. EndPopups.com Popup Manager is free, and it works better than any similar utility I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know what sort of magic the developers of this software use, but they’ve managed to catch just about every conceivable form of pop-up spawned by a Web page. The program itself is unobtrusive, adding a small red bar in the lower left corner of the browser window to indicate that it had blocked a pop-up. If the pop-up window is one you actually want to see (as is the case with some sites that use pop-ups for login prompts), you can click the big E icon to make the window appear.
Highly recommended.
Ed Bott 
Thanks so much for this tip. Those things were driving me crazy and since we’re on cable, they were popping up while I was doing e-mail and when composing documents in Word, etc. I had downloaded “POW” thinking it would do it. That free program IS good for the other pop-ups but didn’t kill the “Windows Messenger” spam and junk. I’m going to spread the word! Thanks again,
Grandma Joyce