Oliver,
The start menu is part of the Explorer shell. You have a few options if you
don't want the typical windows environment.
1) There are several different shells available outside of explorer that are
already part of the XPe database. (Command Shell, Task Manager, etc...)
2) You can create your own custom shell from any application (search the
help for "custom shell")
3) You can turn any other XPe component such as Internet Explorer, Media
Player, Etc into a shell.
4) You can track registry changes with a program like InCtrl5 to see what
registry changes need to be made to auto-hide the task bar on boot.
HTH,
Brad Combs
Imago Technologies