guthmund

First off the top of my head....

I see no reason for these to be up when you boot. realsched is realplayer crap....NCLAUNCH is an extension to flash and probably tied to a screensaver you've downloaded. The Kodak stuff you can probably disable even if you use the program a lot. The second looks to be an updater and you could do that manually if you wanted to. PowerReg scheduler can also be disabled.
WKCALREM is tied to Microsoft Works (calendar reminder?) and seems to be enabled on every HP computer I've run across. Completely worthless unless you use it regularly. I also recognize a lot Norton stuff, which you certainly don't want to get rid of and a lot of Earthlink stuff, which you certainly don't want to get rid of, unless you're not on Earthlink....?

Definately check out kebo's link to disable all the non-essential stuff. Coincidentally while you're in services.msc, you can check out the descriptions of all the stuff that's running and deal with it accordingly.

If you don't want to run>>>services.msc you can download a third party app called WinPatrol. I know several folks, who aren't particularly computer saavy, who use it. It seems pretty user-friendly and works well. The only problem I've seen with it is that it tries to put itself in the msconfig list, but you can disable it as well. Getting rid of all the extraneous stuff that starts up with Windows will certainly help you're PC start faster.

All that being said, you said the gray screen issue started after the change, which means if you solve problem #1, problem #2 will probably go away. Messing around in the registry isn't something I'd recommend, but if you must START>>>RUN>>>regedit will take you where you want to go. I'm pretty comfortable around computers, but even I try to avoid going in there when I can.

I'd recommend finding a third party registry clean up application and trying it first. In my opinion, they're all about the same, but I'll throw out some names of share/freeware stuff I've seen around..Regvac, RegscrubXP, RegistryMechanic...Here's a list at Download.com of some shareware stuff.

You didn't mention it, but I'd be remiss not to say a good dousing with Ad-Aware or Spybot wouldn't hurt either.

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