Q I am tired of just about every program loading a mini-icon on the system tray. Testing shows some of them reduce system resources by approximately two per cent. How do I get rid of them?

A It isn't the presence of the icons on the tray that is taking up system resources, but the running of their applications. You may want to shut some of these down when you run a particularly memory-intensive program. Unfortunately, as you've discovered, there isn't a single standard way to exit an application whose only appearance on screen is its icon in the tray area.

Here are some things to try. First, if you decide you want a given utility running only occasionally, right-click the Start button, choose Open or Explore, navigate to the StartUp folder, and move the icon to a different folder within the Start menu folder. The next time you start your system, the utility won't run until you start it manually.

If you don't see the utility in your StartUp folder, open the win.ini file in Notepad (it's in your Windows folder) and look for lines beginning run= and load=. Copy the offending line, paste it on a new line, and type a semicolon at the beginning (the far left). This disables the copy but makes the disabling easy to undo if you change your mind. Now delete the name of your utility's .exe file from the original run= or load= line.

Some applications run right from the Windows Registry. In those cases, your best bet is to call the manufacturer.

If you like your utilities to run most of the time but want to exit one or more of them on occasion, try this. First, right-click or left-click an icon in the tray. Some utilities, such as Win 95's Resource Meter, will display a menu from which you can choose Exit or at least display a window from which you can exit the program, as in the figure below. Other times you must choose the application's Shortcut icon from the Start menu as if you were starting it for the first time (select StartûProgramsûStartUp). This will sometimes open the utility's main window, from which you can exit the application.

For really stubborn cases, try pressing <Ctrl>-<Alt>-<Delete> (just once) to open the Close Program dialogue box. Select the application's name in the list and click End Task. This can be a bit confusing, since the list doesn't necessarily display the name you're used to. For example, to shut down Windows 95's System Agent, select Sage, then click End Task. To figure out which name you want, use the process of elimination.