Autostart annoyance

I find it ironic that Windows too often goes through this extra "security" step of asking you if you really want to do something even though you just tried to do it, but has no checks on programs that love to put themselves in the startup.  The most annoying offender of all is the MS Live IM client by the way, but there are other programs that slow up my boot time by automatically installing in in the startup with no option to tell it not to do that.