Shawn,



Thanks for another great tutorial.
The 'Through Task Scheduler' option worked for me.
Wanted to run 'Hot Swap' so I can safely unplug my external hard drive, only use it for backups.
Had to set it to 'start at login' and unselect 'autostart' option on the program.
Now it's working like I want it to.
Your helping a lot of us who want to learn 'to do it ourselves'.
Seems like whenever I want to find out how to do something, I can find it here and your name is on it!
Great work.......
Dave

Just to be safe, I just removed explorer.exe and SVPWUTIL.exe from my start-up programs. Should I keep these?

EDIT:
Nevermind. I can't remove explorer.exe from my startup. I wonder why Bleepingcomputers tells you it's undesirable to have at startup.

Thanks for this great tutorial. I have one question though: how do I know which programs I can disable? Some are obvious but I'd like to know which ones are essential for Windows to run at startup.
Thanks,
--e.

Also, I don't know if you know of the web site but Bleeping Computers (Another computer forum, one that includes HiJack This log help) has a nice list to help you determine what you might find desirable to keep. But then again, they said that explorer.exe was undesirable and it's essential to have running. I would try googling it first like Brink said and if you can't find anything, join Bleepingcomputers (it's free) and look at their suggestions.

Shawn,
On the OP, you said:
>However, it is also unacceptable to allow administrative programs that are started
>from these locations to prompt for your consent every time you start up your computer.

I have an administrative program in startup.
Every time vista starts it asks for admin permission.
Is your OP out of date?

thanks,
gordon
vista basic, SP2