Hi Rick,

Cleanup is a good thing! XP typically comes with all sorts of crap running that can be safely removed from the startup locations. I have a list of stuff that you can do to clean up so here goes:

I wrote this awhile ago and it was addressed to some newbies. Some may be applicable and ignore the rest.
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Here are some things to help either speed up your machine or clean off some of the crap that surfing leaves behind. I am not going to mention virus software because I know you are running it all the time and updating your definitions once a week, right? <GRIN>

On most machines, there are 4 places that stuff starts and runs from. You can get to two of them by right clicking on the Start button and choosing Explore. This will put you at your Start Menu folder. Expand Programs and look in the Startup folder for stuff that starts. The other location of this type is the All Users folder. Negotiate upwards from your profile folder and find the All Users folder. Again, expand the Start Menu\Programs to get to the Startup folder and whack anything not needed.
The other two locations are in the registry. First thing to do is back up your registry. Go to Start>Run and type in regedit and hit Return. Click File>Export and choose the radio button All on the bottom. Provide a filename and location and click Save. After this, go to the following locations in the registry and delete the crap that you do not want to run.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run

On all the above locations, use common sense in deleting the entries. If you have no idea what it does, it may be better to leave it alone.... If you want to find out what a process is and does, go to http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/ and search for the name of that process. This site will definitely help you decide!!

Once you have cleaned everything up, reboot and the garbage will not restart. In addition to cleaning up the registry, there are two programs to install and run religiously...........
AdAware - The best ad and cookie finder out there - http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
In conjunction with AdAware, SpyBot works wonders - http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

Finally, you can find out what services are running on your machine by right clicking on My Computer, choose Manage, click on/expand Services and Applications, and click Services. Be careful what you disable here as you can totally hose your machine!! Again, you can use liutilities from above to determine what these things are. If you want to disable something here, right click it, choose Properties, change the Startup type to Disabled, click Stop, and then click OK.


"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity" - Robert Heinlein