• You may have encountered a squatter with an address similar to Historic Hampton Roads'. Occasionally, individuals will register domain names that are one letter off from a well-known URL in hopes of attracting those who make mistakes in their typing. Please be sure to enter http://historichamptonroads.com/ into your browser and the pop-ups may go away.
• Another possibility is that you visited a site while surfing, and that site launched pop-up windows in the background. These ads are known in the advertising industry as "pop-unders" and are not a generally accepted marketing method by the standards of our company. Other web pages trigger pop-ups when a user leaves that site. When you came to HistoricHamptonRoads.com, the windows may have become visible. Again, we do not condone this practice and do not in any way authorize its use on HistoricHamptonRoads.com.
• If you have installed some free programs, especially music-sharing programs such as BearShare or AudioGalaxy, you may have installed other programs as well. These tiny "time bombs" can show pop-ups at random intervals or based on anything you type on a web page. A summary of these programs can be found in these articles: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-257592.html and http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,49960,00.html.

If you are experiencing pop-ups generated by one of these malicious programs, you may want to remove the pop-up program from your computer. One program that attempts to detect and to uninstall pop-up programs is available at http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10106-108-63806.html. We have no relationship with the individuals who created this software and cannot vouch for it ourselves.
If you feel you were deceived when you installed a program that creates pop-ups, you may want to take action. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online", call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580

If your complaint is against a company in another country, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.
We wish you luck in your quest to quell pop-ups.
If you follow all these suggestions and still have a "pop-up problem" on HistoricHamptonRoads.com, feel free to write to us. It will help us if you can right-click on the pop-up window and select "Properties" from the drop down menu. If you write us, include the URL address that you see, so we can investigate the source of the pop-ups.

*Thanks to Google for the inspiration and some of the text/links for this item.