Brian - not correct at all. Stopping all those unnecessary programs from loading does much more than speed up your boot time. First off, they consume memory and thus can affect your overall computer processing. And internet speed, while certainly affected more by the speed of your internet connection, is also affected by overall processing power.

More importantly, most of those programs in fact do use bandwidth. They are designed to open and close internet connections. Some of them may be open quite awhile and/or check for updates and the like quite frequently. Also, some of these processes are very misbehaved and thus may not close properly or at all. They can also malfunction in other ways. Do you ever have unexplained computer blips? Thought so - one of the very first things that any competent tech support person will have you try is to disable ALL startups and see what happens. Takes care of the problem quite often.

And finally - it could also be that one of those itty bitty programs is a trojan that has been missed by whatever security you use.

I do agree that you should be conservative about deleting startups, however there are a couple of sites that provide very helpful information about almost any of these things. With just a little bit of effort, most novices can begin trimming in no time. And "msconfig" is most definitely not the place to do this. I won't bother going into all the reasons, but just use the tool I recommend or something similar.

Also, it is not correct that your desktop icons do not affect your internet connection. Having a lot of them may slow your boot time a bit - but that is all. It really makes no sense to move them, except if your desktop is cluttered.

You may be getting confused between those icons and the processes they represent. The icons do NOT show what programs are running. They represent a segment of your installed programs (not all installed programs put an icon on the desktop). Installed programs have nothing at all to due with running programs.

In fact, it is the program to which I referred, or "msconfig," that will give you a much better picture of what is running. Even those programs do not give the whole picture - as they just show the programs and processes that are set to launch at boot up. You actually have to call up the Windows Task Manager to see EVERY thing that is running on your computer at any given time.

Mel - Normally a broadband provider will provide all their subscribers with a homepage area. You should go there and log in. There will be an area with all of your emails - this is actually the place where all of your emails can be seen before they are downloaded to your computer and put into Outlook Express.

They should have a folder on the email page that has all the emails they have marked as spam. You can view them, delete them, unmark them so they are not spam, etc. There are probably some defaults you can change - for instance, how long they are kept before they are automatically deleted.

rfinney