Please be a patriot and follow the Department of Homeland Security's recommendation to trash Internet Explore and to install Mozilla Firefox or Opera.
Ain't no way in hell I would ever go back. Both alternatives are faster, safer, and more efficient to navigate around in. Letting other people run code on your machine is just plain stupid today. Those pop-ups are caused by Microsoft allowing programmers on any part of the planet to have permission to run thier programs on your machine - browser hi-jacks same, trojans, viruses, and worms - same.
Internet Explorer hasn't been developed in years by Microshit once they destroyed Netscape Navigator.
Do it for your country! I run Opera and the hardest thing about installation was remembering my user name and password. One click and it was installed. You can always go back to IE for the limited number of times that you really want to risk yourself using ActiveX - like on our photo server here.