Over 60 Processes running, normal?

Hi everyone. Recently found this site to help with a malware/spyware problem. Got great help and I think i've finally got a clean machine running. But in dealing with that problem, I realized it's running a heck of a lot of processes on startup (somewhere between 60 - 70). I'd love to remove some of the startup items, and delete any unneeded processes, but honestly i'm not surely what I can safely remove without compromising my system's functionality. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm running Windows XP SP2 on a Compaq Presario AMD Athlon XP 3000+
2.16Ghz 512mb RAM

I'm also still running Norton's AntiVirus, which i know is a resource hog, but am planning to switch to another antivirus program. Zonealarm, microsoft broadband networking are also running.

The biggest resource hogs at the moment are:

firefox.exe 35mb
svchost.exe 25mb
explorer.exe 25mb
CCAPP.EXE 22mb
vsmon.exe 19mb
MsMpEng.exe 12mb
MSASCui.exe 9mb
rundll32.exe 7.6mb
hpobrt07.exe 7mb
hposts07.exe 6mb
zlclinet.exe 6mb
CCSETMGREXE 6mb
kbd.exe 5mb
CLI.exe 5mb
csrss.exe 5mb
svchost.exe 5mb

(sorry about the long post, couldn't figure out how to save a screen image of the task manager as a file)

If anyone has any suggestion of what can be removed and how to do it I'd be very grateful.

Thanks again,

Tanuki

 

Tanuki: None of those are really using a 'massive' amount of memory and look normal to me.

Perhaps you should consider buying a bit more RAM for your computer.

Matt

PS: The best i've had is Explorer.exe using 300 and something MB (viewing a large folder of images with thumbnails) and Visual Studio regularily uses over 200 mb.

 

HI!
These can be disabled:

I have 45 running processes so you must have a lot more nonessential items than what you've posted.
You can check them all out here: http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/kbd/

Scroll down to the search box and type in the process you want to know about for info regarding it's necessity.

 

Hi Toni, yeah unfortunately I think I have quite a few non-essentials running. I will disable the ones you recommended and check out the link you posted.

Thanks.

 

A really great tool for managing your processes is winpatrol: http://winpatrol.com/ (it's clean, I promiss)

While the task manager will just give you the name of executable like so:



Winpatrol will show you the program along with the option for a little info about it:



(Note: this tab in winpatrol is only startup entries. To see all running processes, go to the "Active Tasks" tab)

When you click info, you find out some useful stuff:



If you subscribe to their "WinPatrol PLUS" you can find out even more. I don't subscribe to this service, so I cannot vouch fot it.