hithere

There are some process under taskmgr, which i dont know what they are used for. I cannot find them in the control panel "service", or under "startup" in my login profile. Where else can i single them out? Autoexec.bat is only run under Dos not windows. And is it possible they start from window registry? is there a way to list them out from the registry? how? (Norton did list some of them out, wonder how it did, like web rebate)
Thanks!

Blink182

i'm not sure, but you should download some anti-virus clearup and spy-ware clearup. scan it and see your results.
everytime you download something,be sure to scan it first.

hithere

i think they are spyware, coz i found the memory usage under "performance" does not match the total of the processes. After i installed Norotn, these spyware disappeared, like webrebate, etc. Norton found 54 of them.
But there are still some process which i dont know what they are used for. I can kill them manually, but it is always up again when the machine is restarted. That is y i want to find out from where they got started automatically. there are 4 or 5 processes, under my login profile name, not system ( under which the services started). One of them is run32.dll, another one is hkkey.exe (something like this).

More ideas?

hithere

After i searched my harddisk for these process, found out that they all belong to XP service pack, under  folder c:\windows\prefetch. Windows will automatically create this folder again if it is deleted. There are 5 of these processes, either for MS money, or something else. They are still always up to run even after Money is removed. Microsoft!