Well as it gets older the windows goes slower and slower , ussually it goes by reinstalling it , but if i understood well, you want to control the aplication that start themselves on startup you can do it so:
Go to My Computer then : C:\Documents And Settings\USER ACCOUNT NAME\Start Menu\Programs\Startup , And you simply delte the aplications you dont want to start on startup. You can get a little moore info about that on microsoft's site at this link :
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...s/autorun.mspx