I've got a couple of programs that show up on the taskbar near the clock
and I want to get rid of the shortcuts that cause them to appear. What's
the path to where these 'startup' items are located?
First, you should be concerned with *all* programs that start automatically.
Not all of them manifest themselves by an icon in the system tray.
On each program you don't want to start automatically, check its Options to
see if it has the choice not to start. Many can easily and best be stopped
that way. If that doesn't work, run MSCONFIG from the Start | Run line, and
on the Startup tab, uncheck the programs you don't want to start
automatically.
However, if I were you, I wouldn't do this just for the purpose of running
the minimum number of programs. Despite what many people tell you, you
should be concerned, not with how *many* of these programs you run, but
*which*. Some of them can hurt performance severely, but others have no
effect on performance.
Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should do is
determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and what the cost
in performance is of its running all the time. You can get more information
about these with at
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html. If you can't
find it there, try google searches and ask about specifics here.
Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent informed
decision about what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.
