Unpin to Start menu - sounds easy but

[Lainey]

the proggie continues to open up when I log on. What am I missing? Suggestions? The proggie is Gif Viewer

TIA

 

[TrainableMan]

Start menu and startup folder are two different things. The start menu is just the default menu items you see when you hit the start orb, but they do not run automatically when windows boots. If you click "more programs" and find the "startup" folder it is likely in there and you can just delete it. It is also possible it is in the registry to run on start, so if you don't find it in startup, and you can't find an option in the program itself to check or uncheck "run at startup" then download ccleaner and go to tools ... startup and select it and delete.

You should have ccleaner anyway to free up hard drive space & clean the registry at least once a month or so. See our recommended freeware HERE.

 

[etalmar]

You should have ccleaner anyway to free up hard drive space & clean the registry at least once a month or so.

Have read numerous conflicting reports on several forums about registry cleaning in general. More people are advocating cleaning the registry every six months or longer on new systems, as they feel that excessive cleaning can cause system instability, while I see that you recommend that the registry be cleaned at least once a month or so. Just curious as to your reasoning.

 

[TrainableMan]

If you don't install and delete much I would say the registry part could go 6 mos. It's primary value in registry cleaning is cleaning up remnants of uninstalled software.

But for space etc I like to make sure the cookies and cache files are cleaned because they can cause browser slowdowns.

There are some registry cleaners that are not well written and can actually cause damage but ccleaner has years of experience and I have used it most of that time with no complaints. It is also recommended by most members of this forum for it's ease of use and problem-free execution. There are even some users that run ccleaner daily, which I would consider excessive but not dangerous.

As with any tool it should be used correctly, such as making a backup before deleting registry entries, and it should be based on your own personal work-habits and comfort level.

 

[etalmar]

If you don't install and delete much I would say the registry part could go 6 mos. It's primary value in registry cleaning is cleaning up remnants of uninstalled software.

But for space etc I like to make sure the cookies and cache files are cleaned because they can cause browser slowdowns.

There are some registry cleaners that are not well written and can actually cause damage but ccleaner has years of experience and I have used it most of that time with no complaints. It is also recommended by most members of this forum for it's ease of use and problem-free execution. There are even some users that run ccleaner daily, which I would consider excessive but not dangerous.

As with any tool it should be used correctly, such as making a backup before deleting registry entries, and it should be based on your own personal work-habits and comfort level.

Thank you TrainableMan, for one of the most easily understood and concise explanations about the importance of cleaning the registry and how often one should do so. I too have been a CCleaner advocate for years and used it on a regular basis on my Win98SE desktop, with never an issue. That rig served me well for nearly 11 years, before I finally took the plunge into Win 7 64-bit architecture.

Since graduating to a new OS, I was curious about registry cleaning protocol, as I wondered if a different approach might be called for, but after reading your post, I see that the same concept applies - if you download and uninstall a lot of programs, you should clean the registry on a regular basis. If you don't, then semi-regular cleaning will suffice.

My habits fall somewhere within the middle. I'm more of a moderate program enthusiast and clean my registry about every two months. I just ran the CC registry cleaner today and it found 107 invalid entries. Haven't experienced any problems, although I always select the option to save a backup before I delete them, in the unlikely event that I would need to restore.

I appreciate your input. It helped to clarify what I had been doing all along.

 

[TrainableMan]

If you notice the "errors" it finds in the registry, most are never a problem. Such as Microsoft Word maintaining a history of the last 4 or 5 documents you edited and some of them were drafts you deleted (file not found). Word expects that so it isn't an issue.

Most registry errors aren't really errors, they are just extraneous information that will not hurt anything. If your registry was full of information that had to be regularly parsed down through to finally find a broken endpoint then yeah it may slow your computer down a few nanoseconds but in general the only effect of, I would guesstamate, 98+% of registry cleaning is a few bytes less of data.