I was only joking when I said uninstall Office, sheeeeeesh, did you remove the Office Quick Start from the start up folder? that was one of the primary options.
Not using HTML in email clients that used Word as their editor was the next, did you try both of those before you uninstalled Office? or did you not take any notice of the posts in the other thread at all? did you read any of the links? did you try any of the fixes found in your Google search results? or did you just disregard all that information in your blind panic that Winword.exe was a trojan despite being repeatedly reassured it wasn't?
Honestly mate, if you're not going to take any notice of the advice given you may as well not bother asking.
The blank entry in msconfig: Have a look at this and try the fix
LINK
Once again, simply found, using Google
EDIT: As to the scratching noise, it may well be the hdd, but without a better description I could guess there is a cat in there trying to get out.
Most hdd read/write heads become noisy with age, some disks do it from new, if you have S.M.A.R.T. monitoring enabled (assuming your disk(s) support it) you have nothing much to worry about until it informs you of imminent failure.