startup alteration [View All]

Hi- I have an HP Pavilion computer that has Windows XP. I use IE and have McAfee virus and spyware protection. I know very little about computers.

Here's the problem: when I go to run> msconfig> startup there are two alien entries at the bottom of the list. In the the "Startup Item" and "Command" columns they don't have names- just five squares. In the "Location" column they both say HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\Curren... (CurrentVersion?). When I start the computer I now get four error messages that file box box box box box cannot be found. I tried unchecking the two entries but got an error message that I had altered the startup and needed to go back to all boxes being checked (can't remember the text of that message exactly). So now I have to run everything listed under startup (the computer is a a hand-me-down and there are some programs I prefer not to run). The computer seems to run just the same in spite of this.

Also recently I noticed that the box marked "Enable third party browser extensions" under the Advanced tab in Internet Options had been checked, so I unchecked it. I had been getting quite a few IE error messages (needs to close, sorry) that have stopped since I did this but the timing could be coincidental. I don't know if this is related to the startup problem.

I think I caused this problem. Sometimes when I went to my homepage, Google, I'd get a blank page and the address would be "about:blank" so I downloaded something to scan for "about:blank".

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I would like to know what was altered in my computer and how I can fix it. Would a registry cleaner help?