Control Startup Applications

We are going to see how to control our start-up applications with a little registry operation...
First, a start-up application is a program that is executed as soon as Windows starts. The applications are started by the windows explorer, and the services, by the svchost.exe .
But how do this programs know which programs shall be executed? They read some keys in the registry that tell them so... We are going to learn how to modify this keys, so we won't need to download a program to do the job, and of course to praise ourselves to our friends :)
We open the registry editor with these steps: In windows vista: press start button and in the search bar type: regedit and press enter. Click continue to continue(duh!).
In windows XP: press start button, press run, type regedit, press enter.

The registry editor will open. Follow this path:
computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
In the right will appear some keys. In the column 'name' you can see the programs' names, and under the data their paths. Note that the names mean nothing for the computer, it's the data that is important. A virus can avail from this by putting it's path in the data of an innocent program and run itself rather than that program...
If we want to stop a program from executed with the windows we simply delete the key:
right click on the key, click delete. If we want a program to run with the windows we right click in the empty space, new>string value, and we write the path of the program.

By Vasilis Nicolaou