This one has bothered me for a loooong time. I often browse places like Fark.com and the SDMB and in doing so open multiple IE windows. Pages load while I read. Next, one of the pages I just opened will pop up on top of what I am trying to read, very often repeatedly. Is there an easy way to stop this from happening?
Microsoft’s TweakUI utility has a Prevent applications from stealing focus option which should do the trick.
Absolutely outstanding Number! All I was looking for an more, many thanks.
Heya Bong, I want to suggest another program that you might find helpful…
It’s called NetCaptor ( http://www.netcaptor.com/ )
Its primary feature is that it arranges your seperate IE windows into one application with tabs, making them much easier to switch between. Look here here for a screenshot.
If you like having a lot of windows open at a time (as I do), I think that makes them a LOT easier to handle. Instead of having a bunch of them stacked into an unuseable mess on your taskbar, they’re seperated into little tabs with clearly identified names.
Among other things, it can also prevent pop-up advertisements from ever showing up, so you don’t have to close them afterwards.
I don’t work for them or anything, I just wanted to mention it because I once had the same problem you did and I really liked NetCaptor after I tried it out. But, of course, if you’re already satisfied enough with the TweakUI solution, you don’t have to bother 
" Its primary feature is that it arranges your seperate IE windows into one application with tabs, making them much easier to switch between. Look here here for a screenshot."
Netscape 7+ has that in it already, a nice feature too.
Opera has it as well, and you can force it so it won’t open pop up windows unless you specifically requested a window (say by clicking on java script).
The reason I mentioned NetCaptor was because it uses IE to render its pages, so you’d probably get less compatibility problems than with Opera or Netscape (but of course, you’d also get exposed to IE’s problems)…