Question

What’s the best way to programmatically start an application on login for Windows? I know you can do it by adding an item to the startup folder in the start menu, but I want to have an option in my application to turn it off and on.

Answer 1

This is how you could do it in C#:

Registry.SetValue(@'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run',           'MyStartUp',           @'C:\StartUpApp.exe'); 

You basically need to add a registry entry. The above one works on start-up. There are a few more. I recommend that you download a tool like Autoruns to see all possible locations.