That's going a bit too far, Gemm. People have things in their startup group because they want them starting up. Removing all those checks for stability makes the OS less useful. Basically, you want to use those tabs to figure out what specifically is causing the problem, so that you can eliminate the problem and still use all the other things you want.
Now, EVERYTHING in ALL tabs of that little app are accessed and loaded when Windows starts up. It might not be in the Startup group. It may be in one of the others.
so, here's what you do if you want to narrow it down. It's a long process and there is a LOT of restarting, so you'll have to be patient.
Click Start, choose RUN, and type MSCONFIG and then hit ENTER.
In the main tab of the dialog box, uncheck two of the options (I believe it's 5 options in win98, but I don't remember), click ok, and restart. Then run the computer, if the problem doesn't manifest, it's one of the tabs you unchecked. If you still have the problem, it's one of the ones you have checked.
Either way, try doing it with just ONE of the boxes checked. Basically, you WANT the problem to manifest, because that tells you that the box you have checked is the one with the problem. If the problem was still there, the box you want checked will be one of the ones you left checked before. If the problem is gone, then the problem was one of the ones you had UNchecked. Try this till you know which box it is. You'll have to restart every time you change where your checks are.
Once you know WHICH of those boxes is the problem area, then go to the appropriate tab, and uncheck half the items you see listed. Restart
Again, if you still have a problem, it's something you have checked. If you don't, than it's something you unchecked. Uncheck everything but HALF of the group that you know has the problem. Keep halving it until you find the one item that causes the problem. That's your culprit. You should then be able to recheck everything in all tabs of the dialog except the one item causing your problem. Voila! You have all the usefulness you want, but no problem
Now, you'll probably see the names of LOTS of stuff in there that you have no clue what it is. Basically, if you don't know what it is, DON'T DELETE IT. You may not need it on startup, but you'll probably find it belongs to something you wanted to use.
otoh, if you see something that you can identify, and you know you didn't want it (you'll probably see several of these as well) then go ahead and uninstall/delete the stupid thing. It's just taking up resources that you don't want it to use.
Make sense?