•To see the programs currently running on your PC
 o Push Ctrl-Alt-Del on your keyboard
 o You should now see a dialog box labeled Close Programs
 o There will be a list of names. Each one of those is a program running right now in the background.

Two of the items listed here are always there – Explorer and Systray – those are Windows components and they are supposed to be there. But everything else is a program running now that gets loaded automatically every time you start Windows.

But how do they get loaded?

There are a couple of places where you can find out.

1.Look at your startup files.
 • Go to Start/Run, and type Sysedit.
 • In the resulting window you’ll see many cascading Windows.
 • In the Autoexec.bat window you might find a few lines to start a program. Or in the Win.ini file, look at the load= and run= lines. Anything in those lines after the = sign is a program to be loaded.

2.Windows also has a startup folder where it checks every time Windows starts. If there are any programs listed, it will start them automatically. You can find the contents of the startup folder by going to Start/Programs/Startup.
You probably think how did they get in there since you didn’t put them there. Some of them need to be running in the background to function properly, such as a virus scanner. They put themselves into a startup menu automatically when you install them. Others might not need to be there, but they load anyway to be available when you need them.