Does anyone know how to stop these pop-ups (pop-up blocker is on!)

[Thrifty]

they're driving me mad. must be somekind of software. every time i open something in IE it opens another webpage in a new window. for example,i click next page on thread im reading and another IE window opens with some random (well not quite as they all seem quite relevant!!) website. its quite bizarre. it just means when i surfing i end up with loads of windows open and it really slows the puter down,so i have to keep closing them all.
sorry this a bit garbled,any help on stopping this will be greatly appreciated.

bump

Something has almost certainly downloaded and installed itself to do that. It may have presented itself as something useful ("Click to speed up your internet!!!") or sneaked in when you were not looking.

Anti-virus software tends to look for different things. Do you have any anti-spyware software? If not get Spybot which is free and will list things it thinks are dodgy and offer to delete them.

Do you also have any extra toolbars at the top of IE?. Some of them install there.

we have avg and avg toolbar,its normally pretty vigilant, it scans all the emails and stuff. lol at sneaked in when i wasn't looking.
will look into spybot,dp says we have that. some of them come up with 'favorit' on them,i wondered if that rang any bells?

ooo, have run spybot and it found 55 different issues, so have deleted them and hopefully they've gone away now,there were all sorts of trackers and ad programs. thanks onagar.

'favorit' did indeed ring a bell. It's an advertising program that does popups so possibly the one that was causing the problem.

ooo....deleted everything but its come back
have looked in program files for 'favorit' but cant find it to delete it.

Does Spybot say favorit is back? or is favorit in Control Panel - Addremove programs?

It's possible that it's been reinstalled (if it was that in the first place). Things like 'favorit' are somtimes bundled with other programs that you do want so that when you install them it installs the advert popups too.

ahh.... favorit didnt come up on spybot. we've had to reinstall iplayer and flash. couldn't find it in dd/remove programs. will have another look though. its not quite as bad as it was before. only getting the occasional one now,not one every click.

have searched the whole of the computer but can'tfind any programs called favorit :-(

Well it could be a different one as there are quite a few. Usually spybot finds them though. Make sure spybot is updated.

Do you have any toolbars/addons for your brower? is it Internet Explorer you use or firefox or another?

If IE then on the tools menu you can click 'manage addons' to see if there is anything in there that you don't recognise.

have rerun spybot and removed another load of tracker cookies,hopefully it'll help.

thanks onagar:-) its IE there was an add on called 'research' I have disabled it,and will see what happens.