What section were you in when it happened, as last night was bored so fired up my win7 and basically opened up Ie going here but not found any pop-ups launching.
Also your IT dept. might want to check their group policies as assume your work machine is on a network and if so it'll prob. be Active Directory. As it sounds like your desktop's aren't locked down enough and for a business machine that's dangerous, even its it's stand alone still needs to be more secure.
I spent many years in design and architecture of windows server & desktop platforms, Core O/S & Active Directory, group policy, DNS, DHCP & VMware, Citrix & MSTS were my key area's of specialisation.