Blank name and Command in startup list

[Gen.Ben]

I was doing my monthly system cleanup and in MSCONFIG I noticed that there were two Objects that had blank Names and Commands.

The location of these processes are HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run



Spyware?

Is it safe to remove these objects from startup?

[Dog]

Yep..

[Hamese]

It is amazing what gets put into the Run location. Anything in there that I cannot identify generally gets deleted. Most of the time one can tell it is spyware because of the name with radom characters and the location of the system directory.

[llama_beans]

Do you always run your machine as a local admin?

[Gen.Ben]

[quote="llama_beans";p="20682"]
Do you always run your machine as a local admin?
[/quote]

If i am in that screenshot... I guess I do.

[llama_beans]

you may want to make another user that is not a local admin and use him to surf the web, will cut back you spyware greatly. From what I have seen most spyware/malware is written with the user running as a local admin in mind. Because most home users do.

[LJ]

Those blank entries in msconfig isn't necessarily spyware. Sometimes that can happen when a program gets uninstalled and isn't entirely removed from the registry. The location you see in msconfig is that path in the registry. HKCU stands for HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKLM stands for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. If you go to that path you'll see entries on the right hand side and you'll see that an item or 2 has no data name and no value. That means there's just no value set for it. So, nothing gets run. There's absolutely no harm in removing it.

Also, you should consider avoiding leaving things unchecked in msconfig. msconfig is considered a diagnostic utility and is used for exactly that; diagnostics. If you start having any problems with your computer you can use msconfig to uncheck/check items as needed to see what the problem is. Once the problem is tracked down you should make the necessary changes in the registry or by using 3rd party utilities like spybot or hijackthis. Leaving items unchecked in msconfig makes future diagnostics confusing because you may forget exactly which items were checked/unchecked.

[Gen.Ben]

[quote="LJ";p="21219"]
Those blank entries in msconfig isn't necessarily spyware. Sometimes that can happen when a program gets uninstalled and isn't entirely removed from the registry. The location you see in msconfig is that path in the registry. HKCU stands for HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKLM stands for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. If you go to that path you'll see entries on the right hand side and you'll see that an item or 2 has no data name and no value. That means there's just no value set for it. So, nothing gets run. There's absolutely no harm in removing it.

Also, you should consider avoiding leaving things unchecked in msconfig. msconfig is considered a diagnostic utility and is used for exactly that; diagnostics. If you start having any problems with your computer you can use msconfig to uncheck/check items as needed to see what the problem is. Once the problem is tracked down you should make the necessary changes in the registry or by using 3rd party utilities like spybot or hijackthis. Leaving items unchecked in msconfig makes future diagnostics confusing because you may forget exactly which items were checked/unchecked.
[/quote]

I only unchecked 3rd party applications that I installed myself and do not need at startup, and were slowing me down at start.