After tweaking out several service prorgams on XP I am running about 28 programs at start up and that includes my protection.
My sister-in-law had me put a new virus protection program on her new Acer lap top after the trial period one she got when she bought expired.
The W7 had 45 damn programs running at start up not including the protection program. As new as it was it took forever and a day to get loaded.
After tweaking it out I got it down to 33 including the protection program. Service programs for pictures, MS Office, iPod and the other shit was either put on maual start or disabled. Updaters for such programs as Google, Java, Adobe Reader, Lexmark printer, etc. where the majority of what was disabled at start.
I also downloaded the ATF Cleaner, Defraggler, and the CCleaner on her system as well.
MS still has the same crappy defrag program it started with. In my opinion it is next to usless.