Re: auto start etc

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Peter Kirk wrote:

Hi there

a couple of quick questions:

(1) when I boot up XP, there are some applications that start automatically: how do I remove some of these applications from this "auto start"?

(2) how do I change the desktop so I can move icons to any position? At the moment there is some sort of "snap to" grid, so icons can only be placed at specific locations - I'm guessing at something like 50 pixels from each other. (So basically I want the grid to be the same size as the screen resolution, and not at 50x50 or whatever it is set to at the moment).


Thanks
Peter



For the first issue the first step should be to check in the options for the program you don't want to start and see if there is a setting to tell it not to run at startup. The next step is to remove any entries you don't want from the two startup folders:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

For anything else uncheck their entries in the startup tab of msconfig:
Start | Run | Msconfig | Ok


Another option is to remove the reference to them from one of these keys in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce

Make sure you have a backup of the registry using a program like ERUNT, http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/ before making any changes to the registry.

--
Rock
MS MVP  Windows - Shell/User

.

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