Is it possible to make a program run on startup by adding it to the “Shell” registry entry?

Question

Is it possible to make a program run on startup by adding it to the "Shell" registry entry? I'm talking about Windows Vista. I want to add to the end of

explorer.exe

to make it

explorer.exe; someOtherProgram.exe;

Would that work?

Answer 1

I would recommend instead adding to registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

or

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce

These will run at startup, after login. More