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I recently bought an older refurbished laptop with Windows 10 on it and I disabled .NET 3.5 in Control Panel->Programs(if in Category View)->Programs and Features->Turn Windows features on or off. Now I get a prompt window every time I log in saying "An app on your PC needs the following Windows feature: .NET Framework 3.5(includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0)". Where should I look to find which program is trying to run at login? I know about \Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\, but there are no programs in there. I also ran msconfig and there are no programs under the Startup tab.

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    For windows 10 - try in Task Manager - under the Start-up Tab?
    – Darius
    Dec 2, 2017 at 7:19
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    I use sysinternals Autoruns. There are something like 26 different ways to autostart an application, and it checks quite a few of them. Windows doesn't often use the Startup folder for non-persistent tasks. that said, if you are seeing this on every login, your .net 3 install has not completed successfully, or is misconfigured. Dec 2, 2017 at 8:34
  • @Darius I disabled some intel video card related services (hkcmd, igfxtray, and persistence module) that were showing on the Startup tab and now I do not the prompt any longer. I was sure I had looked there, but maybe I was under a standard rather than an Admin account ...
    – clearcom0
    Dec 2, 2017 at 20:06

2 Answers 2

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There are a few startup locations in Windows.

In your startup folder:

%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\

In all users startup folder (ProgramData)

%ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\

In the Registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Services (via Registry):

Do not modify the Registry manually unless you know what you are doing.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\

In addition to the above, check the task scheduler (run taskschd.msc) and windows services (run services.msc) - as both can contain processes (or tasks) that auto start when you login.


I would highly recommend using Startup Delayer which is an excellent program (there is a freeware version) capable of editing all of the above with an easy to use interface.

You can find the program here: http://www.r2.com.au/page/products/show/startup-delayer/


Autoruns is another great program to use and is part of Microsoft's Sysinternals toolset. It's available for download here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns

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Current user startup:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\      (> NT5.1)
%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\                (<=NT5.1)

All users startup:

%programdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\  (> NT5.1)
%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\                (<=NT5.1)

Current user registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

All users registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Registry services entries:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\

Better to disable/enable them using:

services.msc

There's a control panel applet that controls these locations, I am using it for many years now: http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/startup_cpl.html

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