I completely removed the dots in my "dev-N900" and in my "spare-N900" as well. But I've never documented anything I've done so far. With "startup" I have: hildon-initscripts maemo-launcher osso-af-startup osso-startup-wizard[*] As long as you don't touch any of the above, you can remove anything that has the word startup in it, most importanly: hildon-startup-progress [*] Add.: funny. I just checked in my "normal-N900" and there I removed hildon-startup-progress *and* osso-startup-wizard (that's the one asking for regional settings and time when you take the battery out for too long). I therefore declare this operation to be safe