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Ah yes. I hate these things. Lots of different software companies want their programs to be running when you boot your computer. Usually, there's no reason for this unless the program is doing something nefarious behind your back. For instance, certain software likes to startup when you boot your machine and record what websites you visit and silently reports that information back to the home base. Other programs just sit there taking up memory and cpu cycles for no good purpose.
In general, things in your startup menu are bad. They hog resources, they make booting take longer, they might be doing bad things. A few exceptions to this are things are firewall programs, virus scanners, and programs that actually do something useful when they run in the background. Also, you should be suspicious of things with cryptic names because they might be something very nasty like a trojan horse.
Here's a tip. Right click on a suspicious item in your startup menu and click properties. From this dialog click "Find target". Now you should be viewing the folder where the target program lives. From here you can look for readme.txt files or other info that might tell you what this program is, and why it's running. If it doesn't sound useful, you can put the shortcut in the recycle bin. If it turns out later you wanted that startup program, you can just undelete it.
Do you have any startup programs in particular you're worried about? You can always ask, what does program xxxxxxxxx do? I'm sure someone here would know if what it does.
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