After posting, I cleaned up a bunch of crap. I had installed a new version of roxio (wife was having problems with her roxio installation, so I put it on my laptop to try it and kept it), and it added several startups and services. In fact, that damn program is startup happy, even if you turn off several of the features in it's preferences. I disabled most of them and changed some to manual from automatic. There were several 'run' keys in the registry I didn't need, so I deleted them too.

Incidentally, qttask (quick time) had a startup run key also, probably from installing itunes, even though I removed it later from the laptop. Every time something updates quick time, it shows up again. Got rid of that too. (again)

I'm back to a reasonable startup configuration.

-David