If you'd use IE7 on Vista you wouldn't have to worry about those annoying popups. I never get popups (well almost never) unless I click a link to allow them for the current site, including DaniWeb.

See, it's not just popups, Dragon. It's those adverts that are on main webpages, those annoying animated smileys etc. You know the ones. All gone!

Probably because they are broke in Vista - like everything else

I find it quite funny that a "modern" web browser needs an add-on to block content from a predefined list of urls.

Quite funny, now that you mention it, most modern browsers don't include an ad blocker utility (Opera being the exception, which I presume you're using). However, that doesn't necessarily mean an add-on is needed -- many browsers, Firefox included, allow you to input a custom CSS file. Blocking ads with CSS is fairly trivial.

Where the ad blocker is really needed is in the website server.

As in a proxy server that strips ads?

it doesn't, if you know a bit about how to configure your system.
Just add some lines to your hosts file that redirect all domains for ads to 127.0.0.1 and they'll never show up again.
Needs some maintaining when you encounter a new adserver, but the most common ones (google, doubleclick, maybe one or two more) will cover 90% or more of all ads.