I'm on an unusual system, so sorry about the no email Etc.

First of all, yes you can remove all those things from the startup menu, unless you really want them loading and taking up memory. All it means is that they will load when you click them.

Same for things in the tool bar on the bottom, remove things that you don't need pre-loading.

And the answer you were looking for...

start > run > msconfig

This will take you to the startup items. You can turn things on or off here and use selective startup. This doesn't remove them, it just stops them from loading at startup.