Apple Quicktime player, that comes as a bonus with your iTunes, has one very annoying feature - it installs (without confirmation) another program called QuickTime Task (qttask.exe) to your system tray that will auto-run the next time you boot your computer.

QuickTime Task is no spyware or malware from Apple but it really serves no useful purpose except occupying some of your precious screen estate and slowing down the Windows start-up and the shutdown process (even if by a few milliseconds)

The annoyance doesn't end here. Though you can disable QuickTime from installing that icon in the system through the Preferences dialog, there have been instances when QuickTime ignored the local user setting.

Here's a simple trick to disable QuickTime Task from your system permanently.

Start the Windows Task Manager, select the process that says qttask.exe and hit delete. This should kill the process.

Next, open the Registry editor and remove the following entry from
HLM\Software\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

QuickTime Task - "C:\Program Files\QuickTime\qttask.exe" -atboottime

Next, open the QuickTime installation folder inside Windows Explorer (C:\Program Files\QuickTime\), select the qttask.exe file and hit F2. Type qttask.exe.old and hit enter. Better still, just hit the delete key.

From the help: The qttask.exe process provides a system tray icon that you can use for quick access to the QuickTime application and additional settings.

If you use the system tray icon to launch QuickTime you should leave this process running, otherwise you can terminate it to free up system resources and/or space on your start bar.