I am compelled by the size of my taskmgr window to agree vociferously. It drives my crazy that I am able to realistically monitor and control the amount of memory and cpu that is used in the background on windows. I can't even really keep track of which things are running. I keep taskmgr open all the time, to be able to kill things that hang or see when something spikes the cpu. But it is almost unintelligable, since there are about 55 processes at any time, most starting at bootup. I have a new machine too, and haven't yet loaded a lot of things! I frequently kill things I think I don't need, but thats hard also, because XP allows them to have any name they want and hides the reference to the files or application, forcing me to search the drive or google the name. Worse, the XP services themselves are labeled svchost.exe. What is that?
Please get someone to create what you are talking about to bring some descoping and some rationality to all this crap that is constantly running. Why should I be forced to choose between itunes and not having both their daemons running all the time. Same for Adobe. Geez!