Why does system information show 50 pages of startup programs (many of them listed more than once) but my mouse softeware dont always load.1 person got this answerI do too

> Reboot your system after running the script and please report back your resultsI found this answer after finding the reference to Ramesh's script here:http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1543910That poster had the problem that these "hundreds of items" (4100 or so, it is actually showing the contents of the system32 folder) seemed to making the computer slow as well. Applying ramesh's fix seemed to fix the problem for him.I have a friend with a glacially slow Win XP system. I've upgraded it from 256M to 512M (plenty, never runs out now) and checked everything else I can think of. It seems to be hammering the disk for a very long time before being able to do anything. It had these "thousands of fake startup items" so I checked the registry keys and found some of them blank; ran Ramesh's program and it filled them in properly. But they don't stick. They go away on the next reboot, and the bad startup list is still there.I've heard rumors that Norton (which this computer has) might be causing problems, but it isn't blocking the script. I disabled everything I could find in Norton and the registry entries still changed after a reboot.So my "reported back result" is that it didn't fix the problem, as something else is corrupting that registry entryBut it isn't a Dell - the following gives a good technical description of this problem:http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-xp-support/136478-system-information-startup-list-being-corrupted.html