For stopping popups, I recommend updating your "hosts" file to null route several hundred known adspam sites. (ad.doubleclick.com) like that so they don't even load. the hosts file is like a dns server on your computer that it checks before the isp's dns server. It is in plain text and you can view it, edit, add,delete sites to your liking. If you point the site to 127.0.0.1 then it searches your own computer for the ad, it cant find it, and gives up with an X for an image. Popups still appear but nothing will load. A program called E-Dexter (search google for it) will have a small benign graphic instead of just an "X" and resolves some of the problems with sites such as yahoo that have "http://rd.yahoo**http"://www.yahoo.com/whatever" which the site wouldn't load (rd.yahoo is considered an adspam site.) unless you took out the ad part from the address bar, e-dexter fixes most of the well-known sites automatically. For a good hosts file, I recommend getting a copy of kazaa lite 2.0.0 and follow their instructions for installing just the host file. it resides in the c:\windows\system\somewhere. I have used this constantly and it is a BIG difference in popup spam. Another debugging note that took me a long time to figure out is if you wish to run a webserver on port 80, you have to disable E-dexter for the time being since it is essentially listening on port 80 already.
I hope that helps your quest on ad nerfing
