Hi Steve,
Let's start with your 2nd question first...you can do one of two things, you could physically disconnect the lead from the back of the cd-rom to the sound card, but by doing that, you would have to reconnect it if at some point you wanted to listen to music cd's through your speakers. Or, you could simply plug in headphones to the jack at the front of the cd (I assume it has one, as not all do) and either mute the sound to the speakers, turn the off, or unplug them from the card...
As for the first question, what OS are you running? WIN95/98/ME you can run MSCONFIG (start->run->type msconfig) and simply go through the tabs for startup, sytem.ini and win.ini and look for those that refer to the programs you don't want to start when windows starts. To be on the safe side though, the best thing to do is when windows starts and is ready for use, press ctrl-alt-del, and write down which programs are currently running (there'll be a list) then post it here so either I or someone else can tell you which ones are unnecessary. (There are some that Windows NEEDS to function correctly, and if the wrong checkmark is removed, windows may not start)
California Kid B-)