I've been told that I should talk about startup programs. I don't like my computer to take any longer than absolutely necessary when booting up. There are quite a few that I just don't let run on startup. Here are a few of them, and how I take back control. For most of them, I use Microsoft Antispyware Beta or Spybot Search and Destroy, in "advanced mode", and just uncheck the items in the startup area, but there are a lot of other free programs that you can use to stop these from starting every time you boot up.

Latest News:
I've recently read some news that suggests that you can improve performance of your computer by an average of 18% just by stopping unnecessary programs from loading at startup. That is huge.

Why do these programs just assume that they are the most important thing running on your computer? Why do they think that they need something running in my taskbar all the time? Does a program that is used to play a sound file once a month really need to be running the second I boot up my machine? NO! If you get enough of these things running on your computer at once, they can clog it to such an extent that the programs that you want to run can not. I'll start with some of the basics.

1. TkBellExe = The Real Player Scheduler - 99% of the people that download the Real Player, just want to listen to something for a little while. That's it. Not schedule Real Player news releases, or whatever that thing is for. I rarely use the Real Player, so I'm not sure about reoccurance once it's removed.
    
2. qttask.exe = Quicktime Taskbar - For some reason, Quicktime wants to run in your taskbar all the time. Again, I think this is inflated program ego. Get rid of it. This one is definitely persistent, so if you view a Quicktime video, it will try to reinstall itself to your startup. It's crazy.
    
3. ctfmon.exe - This is an odd one. This gets installed with Microsoft office. I had to research this to determine exactly what it was and how to turn it off. First I found it here where it says this: A service that handles the Alternative User Input Text Processor (TIP) and the Microsoft Office Language Bar. It provides text input support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies. If you don't need it, why should it run whenever you start your computer? I can't remember exactly where I got the tip, but here's how to turn it off. There is an actual way to turn it off without force. Go to your Control Panel, and find Regional and Language Options. Click on that and find the Languages tab. Click the Details Button, and then the Advanced Tab in the new dialog box. Check the box next to "Turn off advanced text services" and then click Ok. Life is better now... or at least boot-up is a little faster.
    
4. iTunesHelper - I don't have an iPod, but I installed iTunes because it's a great music player and I use it to listen to podcasts, but I don't need the helper running all the time, so I removed it from startup. It will not add itself back in. Now, I never install iTunes. I've found so many better music players.

If you're daring, or feeling dangerous, you can edit this stuff directly in the registry with regedit or msconfig. However, with all of the free little programs out there, you really don't need to. There are quite a few startup managers out there, but I don't know why you'd buy one or try a shareware program when you should have either Windows Defender, or Spybot Search and Destroy anyway.

BTW - check out the free PC Decrapifier to remove the unnecessary craplets that slow down a newly purchased machine.