blank startup file

H

hondro

New Member
i just got done installing xp home and all the video card drivers, sound drivers, and NIC card drivers on my familys computer. after doing so i went to msconfig to get rid of all the unnessesary crap nvidia and nero put on the startup list and i notice that there is a blank startup item in the list. i thought it was weird and was wondering if anyone knows what it is and if its normal.
 
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Sometimes you end up with an invalid entry there as well as in the registry itself. First make sure to uncheck that before exiting the msconfig. You may likely have to reboot to see that unloaded as well.

There are a few tools just for useless unknowns in the msconfig like the msconfig cleanup utility found at http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Secure-cleaning/MsConfig-Cleanup-Utility.shtml

The freeware will let you select which entries will be removed from the list of items in the startup group. You may want to run a good registry cleaner as well to clean up any leftovers there. http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cleaner/registry_cleaner.htm
 
thanks for the replies and suggestions :)
FatalityTech said:
Whoa never seen that before would be interested in finding out though.
Click to expand...

After googling for a bit i found a solution to the problem on http://ask-leo.com/why_is_there_a_blank_entry_in_my_msconfig_startup_entries.html
according to him it's there because of a "malformed registry entry", i believe its from some nvidia drivers i installed and then uninstalled later. it cant harm your computer because its not actually running anything, it's just a blank entry. anyways all i had to do to get rid of it was go into hkey\localmachine\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run where all the startup entries are stored in the registry and when i got there just had to find the key with the blank entry and delete it and the blank entry was gone. :D
 
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That's why I suggested a good registry cleaner before since a good cleaner will usually pick those out while scanning for any useless leftover entries. The msconfig cleanup utility linked there allows you to do this without even opening the registry editor itself. That can keep you from seeing any ut ohs... if you accidently remove the wrong thing.
 
Far from it! CCleaner is far from any ultimate registy cleaner. What you see there is a little uninstaller for programs and cleaning up the IE offline content and history not any full featured cleaner for the registry itself. CCleaner's main purpose is locating and removing temp folders lingering on the hard drive.
 
Even with a program like Eusing you may end up needing to go into the registry itself like hondro had to do there. Sometimes that's the only way to get rid of a particular entry. But the idea behind a dedicated reg cleaner is to scan through and clean up the items you would never even know were there.
 
I know this, but that is probably something it would have taken care of. I have had to edit my reg for a win 453 error before.
 
Not necessarily. I say that due to CCleaner only seeing a very limited cleaner and uninstaller simply added in as an extra.

It's kind of like the side bar in Vista being some "eye candy" more or less rather then being a more thorough cleanup tool intended for that purpose alone. It could be compared to the prebeta tool I've been working for seeing Vista hidden from XP in order to avoid seeing Vista's restore points lost when booting in XP.

One side benefit is the option to configure the dual boot without any entries being made with the EasyBCD tool that it works with but using a form of Grub4Dos boot menu instead. The main intent however is protecting restore points from XP.
 
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