Does AVG Free need to be in XP startup?

I've been using this utility for about 6 months now and its been sitting in my startup menu all this time. I'm currently trying to clean it out and leave only the important stuff. I'm wondering if i take AVG out will i take advantage of its features like the resident shield and email scanning, anyone know?

Yep, i tried doing that. It seems that i did loose all the monitoring features after closing the program when its not in startup, thats the kind of message i got from them. I guess i'll be putting it back in. Thanks for your help.