Joe, there is a wonderful little program called Startup Control Panel put out by Mike Lin. He developed it when he was a student at MIT, I think, and hasn't done much more with it but it still works great.

Visit http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml and download the Standalone EXE version (it's a zipped file, very small). It opens and becomes an icon in your Control Panel. Open it from there and easily kick out all of those programs that have set themselves up to pre-load into your quick launch bar down at the bottom. It's much quicker on many fronts when you don't have Real and QuickTime and Adobe and Nero and all of those programs essentially starting up when you turn on your computer. How long does it take to start them when you actually need them? Not long, so why fool with starting them every day and letting them slow the whole system?

SRS