Well email is what I mean. With all the email addresses I have my PC now tells me I have mail before I log in.

I know my PC does not know if I got mail, it is just looking at the last report Outlook told it. You may have seen the same problem. A number of unread emails that will never go away. A number of things can cause this. You may have more than one bucket for incoming mail. You moved mail from the in-box to deleted by drag and drop. Or maybe outlook crashed and left the registry in a state of (You got lots of mail).

For those of you who are PC savvy the registry location is
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UnreadMail
There will be a subkey for each email address you have or ever had. If you no longer have that email you can delete the subkey. Or if you want to clear the email count the dword value for "MessageCount" contains the number of unread emails for that address. Reseting any of them to zero won't hurt anything even if you have unread emails.

I have also created a simple program that will let you reset the values to zero. The following is a screen above. You can download it here.