John, there does not NEED to be a lot there that you don't choose to start.
VSMON, Systray, DVP95 and Explorer come to mind.  If you stop one of them,
strangeness occurrs ;-)  I think if you stop Explorer, a new copy will
start.

Next would be anything that goes to special hardware you might have, e.g. a
video driver like my aticwd32 (or something close to that) gets started in
my machine.

Also, any open folders will be in that list.  But those should be
recognizable to you.

And of course the worst scenario is a virus or spyware running.  How careful
are you with virus and trojan scanning and updates?

Do you get the same list first thing after booting up each time?  And how
many?  If you get the list, I (or others) could give an opinion on what they
are or could be.  Some items will be in the StartUp folder but many use a
registry key, especially ones that don't want you to easily disable them,
like spyware.

Another possibility is if you use that machine to play with, err, evaluate,
lots of software then perhaps some did not clean up after themselves when
uninstalled?  A lot of "freeware" is actually "advertizer sponsored" which
leads to the spyware being put on your machine.  And there are probably 37
other causes that I have forgotten about <G>.

Gary WA6DTX
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Rabson" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2002 11:43 AM
Subject: Re: LF: argo

Rik said:
> It may help if you can turn off any other software (don't forget all the
> stuff that is started when you launch Windows).
There seems to be an awful lot of this on my machine (if I type

CTRL-ALT-DEL

once I get a list of 17 different processes, most of which I do not
recognise). Where can I find out what they are and what they are for, so I
can decide whether I can safely delete them? I'm running Windows 98 and
Office 97.

Regards,
John Rabson G3PAI