Ah! Well, as I'd never heard of "smartpops" before, all I did was to do a google search and then I went to
here and cut and paste. If it got there without your participation then your firewall may have let a bit of spyware through.
"Smartpops" is a bit of adware well documented
Here and
Here
If I could get my hands on the beast it would be a simple matter to purge the registry of any reference to "smartpops".
Perhaps you could give some more info from "Task Manager" and say what you can see that may be responsible. So:
Right-click on an empty part of the task bar at the bottom of the screen (usually). Left-click on Task Manager. Click on the tab called "Processes" and look down the awesome list of stuff you've got running when you're not doing anything much.
Tell us what you can see that resembles smartpops.
I take it Big Red also has smartpops running.