While looking into why my laptop was taking so long to startup windows, I noticed a program, GoogleUpdate.exe, running. I wasn’t too concerned because I use GoogleDesktop, but since I had disabled that at startup I started wondering why it was still there.
Checking the usual places, I fired up msconfig to see if it was listed anywhere and nothing. Looked in services.msc, nothing there either.
So after a quick search, I ran across this page which shows that GoogleUpdate.exe gets run as a scheduled task which runs at user login. This is also how Apple installs their product updater. This means that this is another way that software can be set to run at startup, even though it isn’t in any of the normal startup locations.
