If you’d like to find out which programs load along with Windows on your PC then Autoruns is a great place to start: it’s small, portable and produces a very detailed report, yet remains very easy to use.

Silent Runners is an interesting alternative, though. It also itemises your Browser Helper Objects, shell extensions, “shell execute” hooks, context menu handlers, print monitors, autoplay handlers and more. And it tries to highlight entries which look suspicious. But the key difference is that the program comes in the form of a VBScript, so you can see how it works, and perhaps tweak the code to suit your needs.

To try Silent Runners, download its zip file, extract the contents and run Silent Runners.vbs. If you can, anyway: a long history of abuse by malware means VBS files tend to make security software nervous. Silent Runners isn’t dangerous in any way, but if you have problems running the script then the author’s FAQ page has some useful advice.

Assuming you can launch Silent Runners, though, it’s straightforward to use. Just click “Yes” in the opening dialog to skip the “supplementary test” (a potentially lengthy test which doesn’t add much), and a minute or two later a plain text report file will appear detailing all the startup programs the script has found.

Silent Runners produces detailed reports, but only in a plain text format

This report can be lengthy, as it covers all the usual startup entry points (and quite a few of the unusual ones, too – this page has the full list).

Because Silent Runners isn’t trying to squeeze its data into a GUI, each individual entry can be very thorough. The first entry in the “Windows Portable Device AutoPlay Handlers” section looked like this on our test PC, for instance.

iTunesBurnCDOnArrival\
Provider = iTunes
InvokeProgID = iTunes.BurnCD
InvokeVerb = burn
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\iTunes.BurnCD\shell\burn\command\(Default) = “C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\iTunes.exe” /AutoPlayBurn “%L” [Apple Inc.]

And the script even tries to highlight suspect entries at common malware launch points by adding a marker – “<<!>>” – to the beginning of the relevant lines. Although this didn’t seem to useful on our test PC, as it just picked out several safe and entirely legitimate programs.

If you have some VBScript knowledge, though, you don’t have to live with this kind of problem. If you’re unhappy with some feature of the program, just edit the script and change it, or strip it out entirely. And then add some features of your own: new tests for the report, perhaps? Maybe generate an HTML file for a better-looking report?

Silent Runners plainly isn’t the best choice for the average PC user, then: running its script can be difficult, and browsing the plain text reports isn’t much fun, either.

It is a powerful tool which offers plenty of configuration possibilities, though, so if you need something more than the regular startup program list then Silent Runners deserves a closer look.