according to a few people recently I have a lot of things pinned to my start up menu , and they're probably right !! how do I 'unpin ' them and is it easy , I'm a real novice so simple instructions would work best thanks

If you mean the actual start menu that appears above the start button then just right click the item that you want to remove and choose: unpin from Start menu.

If you are referring to programs starting at boot you can uncheck these via start/run msconfig > Startup

I have loads of programmes there with a tick to be on the start up menu ( by which I mean on the bottom right hand side of the screen not the main start up menu on the left ) are there any that have to stay there ??? I don't want to mess my computer up
thanks for replying by the way

You mean the System Tray (as they call it) next to the clock: yes?

The only things necessary are your Anti Virus and Firewall for startup.

When you open a program or application then that icon is added to the tray.

You can use msconfig as stated above to edit your startups.

There are check boxes that you can uncheck/check.
Unchecking does not delete anything it only stops (disables) the automatic startup.
You can always go back and recheck (enable) if needs be.

When rebooting from msconfig you will be warned that you are starting in a diagnostic mode as XP considers this function to be a diagnostic tool.

Just click the warning box that says do not show this again.

thanks it did exactly as you said ' I got a warning and got in a panic lol ' but managed to work out to tick the box to say don't show this again. I've still got quite a lot on my system tray as I didn't know what to leave there and I don't know what half of it is lol but my computer started up sooooooooooooo much quicker it was brilliant thank you
might be brave and uncheck a couple more things , what would happen if I accidently unticked the anti virus would it be a case of just reticking it ??
thanks for your help

Yes re ticking would clear up any issues here.

If you want a review of your processes you can do this:

Download: HijackThis

http://www.merijn.org/files/hijackthis.zip

Then run it after unzipping:

Choose Misc Tools then Generate Startup List Log

You can post that text file back here and we will take a look.

I am out of here until tomorrow but will be back.