Explorer.exe
svchost.exe (ALL OF THEM)
winlogon.exe
smss.exe
csrss.exe
wdfmgr.exe
spoolsv.exe
lsass.exe
mdm.exe

Those are all the bare winrun apps that are going on my computer. apart from 'system'. Typically Windoes will not let you terminate a vital systems app (Explorer excluded), try and kill services.exe, and it wont let you (Task manager wont let you, 3rd-party process explorers will).

Pretty much everything else that is running will be a different process like messenger.
I would reccomend the process explorer program from Sysinternals to check it out. it lays the processes out in a nice hierachal dependancy tree.

Thanks- I'll give that a try next time I run Battlefield Vietnam. Also, on a side note, what's a safe place to set the virtual memory paging file for maximum performance if I'm running 256mb of RAM? (yes, I know I need to at least double that)

There was a tweak guide on www.majorgeeks.com

I highly recomend it

For Virtual Memory it depends on how much hard drive space you're willing to sacrifice. For example: I have a 200 GB hard drive, so I use 2 GB as Virtual Memory. In contrast, my friend Peter has a 40 GB and only uses about a gig of it because he lacks the spare space.

One way to save hard drive space is to reduce the size of the recycle bin and system restore features.

You may want to see what is actually using your system resources before you try to shut it down but some process names aren't very clear so you may want to try a program called Process Explorer, latest version that I know of is 9.12
Here's a link if you want from Download.com Process Explorer 9.12

Another program is MKN TaskExplorer 2005 SR2 2.3
TaskExplorer provides diagrams for each process containing CPU- or memory-usage of the process, which is helpful for finding the applications slowing down your system.

Both are free by the way.

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For Virtual Memory it depends on how much hard drive space you're willing to sacrifice. For example: I have a 200 GB hard drive, so I use 2 GB as Virtual Memory. In contrast, my friend Peter has a 40 GB and only uses about a gig of it because he lacks the spare space.

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exactly why i have two 80 gig drives in my comp i won't run out of virtual memory anytime soon

explorer.exe can be endeed, i do it all the time, exiting it and restarting it fixes my core windows problems

I always shut Explorer when windows screws up. If it wont reopen on its own then click start process and type explorer.exe

thanks bp, I'll look into that. As far as the VM goes, can you set it to any value or does it have to be a specific value/and or multiple of your physical memory etc?