I'm not an expert, but I'd say that "no" the startup order is not dependent on the order within the list. If you look, that list is sorted according to the way you have your file explorer sorting- alphabetical.
So the answer to the second question is also "no", you cannot effect the starting order by changing anything on that list. The second part of the answer is that it's not that hard to do. There are programs that will allow you to change the starting order of programs. I use MemMaid [by Dinarsoft] to do just that. There are probably others.
