Vista: Best Startup Technique for S/W Needing Admin Rights

An audio driver and ftp server are two applications that are in my Vista Ultimate startup group. Both require admin authorization to start up. Nothing serious, but a nuisance, as they appear as "blocked" programs and must be manually launched.

Microsoft's Help suggests using Windows Defender to block the startup applications from running. This probably works fine, but didn't sit well, essentially "leave it broken."

Several solutions are possible. The one settled on, described in a forum post, utilizes the task scheduler to launch these applications instead of the startup folder. The task scheduler allows for setting the "run as admin" feature ahead of time. (The Vista task scheduler has a well-thought out UI and may be useful for you for other purposes).

But one of the tasks stubbornly refused to be removed from Startup. Unclear why, but by using the Sysinternals Autoruns utility, which has other benefits as well, the audio driver item could be cleared from the startup registry --without a tedious browse of the registry. (If you're on XP, try Mike Lin's utility).