Well, I went ahead and got Firefox, and it's great! AT first I was bit put off by how ugly the icons were, but I discovered themes! So a good looking browser with, more impotantly, good functionality.

But IE still pops up out of the blue with the infernal pop-ups, so I adjusted IEs settings to the absolute maximum. The problem here, is this is just spackling over the pavement when there's a cavernous hole underneath.
I think there's an "agent" on my computer that calls upon pop-ups, and that all the anti-virus and anti spyware are missing it.