h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The following mentioned in a pop-up, should be avoided at all costs to insure the saftey of the web surfer....

Free
Low
Chicken
WebCam
Click the *INSERT NOUN* and win X amount of $$
Quick and Easy!
Membership
Work at home
Young
Strong
Lonely
Now
Shopping
*and the oh so ironic* "Click here to minimize!"

If one becomes naive, and strays from this helpful message, they may find themselves with carpeltunnel syndrom from the vain attemps to 'X' away shame that reappears at an exponancial rate! Your taskbar never looked so bloated...

I have bad memories from a while ago, when I used Netscape, of the popups on the taskbar getting smaller than the actual Netscape logo...

Oh, and another bad phrase:
'Enlarge your...'

I have found the shortcut key (for windows users, perhaps more, I couldn't say for sure) alt+f4 (close) exceptionally useful in the seemingly unending war on pop-ups. It seems that if you can close a pop-up quick enough, you can often prevent the dreaded pop-up within a pop-up, or the pop-up from closing a pop-up. Though this is only my experience, I could be mistaken. Anyhow, it eliminates all the searching for the constantly moving X as well as it quickly dispatches the full screen or otherwise hidden X windows. When joined with alt+tab (switch window, a menu-esque dialog pops up if alt is held after tab is pressed once and tab may be pressed repeatedly to scroll through while holding alt) it makes a great weapon against the evil raiders.