System Security Managers

[propersplitbrainme]

Over the past few weeks I'd become aware that my PC was taking an eternity to boot, due almost certainly to the amount of crud that it was having to wade through on start. Program installers which chuck extra monitors, managers and licence checkers onto your system without so much as a by-your-leave really grind my gears...Adobe I'm looking at YOU DT_Xtremez_25:
Anyway, I decided to try an all-in-one security manager, found downloaded and installed a trial version of one called Greatis Regrun Security Suite. BIG fecking mistake folks!
Regrun installed an impressive array of tools, ran itself and then promptly informed me that a number of perfectly good system drivers and program managers were malware - false positives I think they call them. Worse still, this piece of bloatware also installed a boot-monitor and startup-monitor both of which ran on startup (obviously) and gave any attempt to turn them off from within the software a damned good ignoring. In fact, just to teach me a lesson for trying to disable them, the Partizan boot monitor would now randomly turn off my keyboard and then refuse to turn it back on again during the boot cycle. Uninstalling the Regrun suite got rid of the main program but, as a final two fingered salute, it didn't remove the Partizan boot monitor; it had to be dug up by the roots and turfed overboard manually ::/:
So, does anyone know of or use a decent security monitor that I can use to turn on/off startup programs and detect malware without trying to take ownership of the whole PC.

 

[Past Engineering]

CCleaner will remove crud etc and you can monitor and turn on/off Startup programmes, if you know what you are doing it will scan your registry and you can decide what to delete.

Then as has been posted before adaware/Spybot etc will remove most that CCleaner does not.

 

[Wildfire]

Have you tried using msconfig (Start Menu, Run, msconfig) and turning the crap off?

I'm got mine set up to do a "clean" boot, nothing but what Windows actually needs, so I can eke some more performance out of my crappy laptop.

 

[propersplitbrainme]

Have you tried using msconfig (Start Menu, Run, msconfig) and turning the crap off?

I'm got mine set up to do a "clean" boot, nothing but what Windows actually needs, so I can eke some more performance out of my crappy laptop.

Yeah I have used MSconfig, the trouble is you can't always tell what crap belongs to which progam without tracking down each file and looking at its properties.
I've now obtained another startup manager which is much less 'arrogant' in the amount of control it tries to take of your system. It also identifies the developer of a particular file that's being run on startup which helps tie it to a particualr program.