javaw and javaws

My computer is old and low on resources, and fires up slowly in the morning. But being bored I looked in Task Manager and saw that javaw.exe and javaws.exe were running, and seemed to be taking up a lot of resources. Maybe they have always been there and I just never noticed them. I googled and found some info.
Both are located in System32. Properties look legitimate (sun microsystems etc).
Both were scanned with Malwarebytes and Avira and no malware was found. The info I found refers to some "virtual machine" - whatever that is. As far as I know this is nothing I ever use or even have. So....
1) Do I have something worry about here?
2) What are these things?
3) Can I get rid of them?
4) Why were they running at startup?

I have XP home edition if this matters.

 

javaw http://www.pcpitstop.com/libraries/process/i/javaw.exe.html
You can stop it from loading at startup. (WinPatrol)
For what it is worth, I have both javaw and javaws in my C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin
but neither process is running when I open my task manager. (running XP SP3)

Do not get rid of them! Some programs might need them. Just stop them from loading at startup. If a program needs java, it should know where to look.