Soluto has been AWESOME (from what I can tell) - it shaved a lot of time off the boot. And I put in a solid state drive (oh, if the corporate overlords found out about that!), which also helped.

I could get over the icon-in-system-tray-that-isn't-used thing with time, but the Backup/Recovery Manager puts a blank window up in the left top corner of the screen after about 30 minutes or so, and won't go away unless you right-click the tray icon and exit.

So it irritates me.

And so it must be destroyed.

So, yes, patio, I do want to checkout Startup CPL... Thanks.My Office install has settled, and I've had some time to snoop around my hard drive.

First of all, this is interesting (to me, anyway):

I ran the Startup Control Panel applet y'all recommended. It showed that there was a Dell utility RUNNING at startup. Trouble is, not only does that .exe file not exist on my HD, the entire subdirectory doesn't seem to exist!







As you can see, I've had all related Dell products turned off in msconfig, and they still show up when I boot:



I did discover in c:\dell, several things:

• Something called "DBRM.ini"
• Something called "DCSUStart.BAT"
• A subdirectory called "DBRM", containing only one subdirectory ("Reminders"), which in turn contained a whole bunch of what looks like language- or region-specific subdirectories. It also contained...
• Two files, one called "DBRMTrayIcon.exe"and one called "TrayApp.exe"