Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Disable Skype Auto Start

Skype starts automatically and it is pretty trivial how to disable it but you have to know how and that's the key which is why I'm writing this. It doesn't show up in the Registry under Software | Windows | CurrentVersion | RunOnce.

So here is how to disable it:

Launch Skype and login. This is the key step because if you don't login the options are different. Go to the Tools menu and choose Options, under General Settings you'll see the checkbox for start Skype when I start Windows. Uncheck that and you're good!

If you don't have a Skype account, then I think you're out of luck because I've used ProcessMonitor to monitor the registry access and haven't been able to find a manual way to disable this.

2 comments:

coderwolf said...

I have not dug into the skype autostart in a few versions, but there are more places than the standard HKCU|Software|Windows|CurrentVersion|RunOnce or HKCU|Software|Windows|CurrentVersion|Run. Though those are the most common.
To the best of my knowledge Sysinternals Autoruns covers all of them though. Some standard catagories to look at in the tools are runs associated with logons(includes the standard ones spoken of above), and ones associated with Windows Explorer restarts(this also includes the desktop shell).
In the version of Autoruns I am using there are almost 20 different autorun catagories.
Just a personal preference, but I NEVER like relying on the 3rd party software to provide me with a way to turn itself off. There have been to many unscrupulous software packages around through the years.

Chris Bensen said...

I dug around all the RunOnce and Run registry keys and found nothing. Used ProcessMonitor to see what it was accessing and nothing made a lot of sense. I could spend more time and figure it out but once I figured out that logging in and the settings are different I decided to blog about it to hopefully save anyone else a bit of trouble and maybe Microsoft will read this and fix it.

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