Remember try these Tools and Utilities at your own risk.

If you visit lots of web site like me you will find a few sites, which open a couple of popup windows with adverts that you will have to close. Then when you click a link to open another page on that site, another couple of popup windows opens with adverts. I was getting fed up with these pop-ups and found a freeware program called Pop-Up Stopper which stops them.

It can be downloaded from
http://www.popupstopper.net/

"IE-SPYAD is a Registry file (IE-ADS.REG) that adds a long list of known advertisers, marketers, and spyware pushers to the Restricted sites zone of Internet Explorer. Once IE-ADS.REG is "merged" into your Registry, most direct marketers and spyware pushers will not be able to resort to their usual "tricks" (e.g., cookies, scripts, popups, et al) in order to monitor and track your behavior while you surf the Net."

http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ehowes/resource.htm#IESPYAD

PopTray 2.0

"This is a full-featured, yet easy-to-use e-mail notifier that can manage unlimited accounts. It shows the number of waiting messages directly on the TrayIcon. It provides a different notification sound and a different check interval for each account. "

http://www.tucows.com/preview/194158.html

A very useful tool for searching the internet is Copernic 2001 basic. And its free *  (but some features are disabled). You can search through multiple search engines at the same time. It also makes use of categories, which you may find useful. Download it at http://www.copernic.com

* correct at time of posting