thank you all for your help, I really really appreciate it. I really don't get upset over a lot of things, but when my computer starts messing up I get frustrated and upset easily.
First, I have no system restore point. I probably should set that up.
Second, I was apparently having trouble hitting F8 at the right time to enter the Advanced Boot Screen, so I went with the "shut down as many processes as quickly as possible" method. It worked, so I downloaded Malware Bytes and ran it, it detected and quarantined five items, all of them related to AV Suite. Upon reboot everything appears cool. I am rerunning Malware Bytes and am downloading Spybot as well (I don't know why I didn't have Spybot on this new machine to begin with, I've run it for several years on other machines).
So I'm tentatively saying it looks like everything is cool. No pop-ups, no programs shutting down. Problem solved more easily then I thought it would be.
so thanks again! looking forward to the mac mini refresh.