selective startup

[a-janus]

when choosing selective startup in msconfig utility general tab all the checkboxes are checked by default including precessing system.ini and win.ini.
Question 1 is why a nt based system or even 9x system need to process these two files?
Qestion 2: Does uncheking the boxes influence performance of the OS?

[njovin]

98 did use these since it kind of ran on an ms-ds base. XP uses these files for legacy purposes I BELIEVE. ex. if an older program were installed and added a line to autoexec.bat, xp would translate that into the appropriate registry setting. I may be wrong but I think I remember reading it that way.