I figured out one thing about the task manager hijack issue. I have a program called winrap which hides other programs from being viewable. Now when I put the winrap program in tray mode where it cant be seen, thats when the task manager becomes greyed out. So I think winrap is doing that. It does not look to be a virus or malware. I downloaded the program from sourceforge so I believe its good. Any comments about this?

And what should I do with the viruses that avast found in the boot time scan? Anything else that needs to be done to make my system secure?