As most of you know, I am much more interested in Linux and OSX than Windows, but since I have to deal with it in and out every day, things like this interest me on a ‘professional’ level. Have you ever peeked into the huge number of services that are running on a windows machine? (Right click on the taskbar and choose processes) - Have no idea what most of them are, whether you can kill them or not, and what they are doing anyway? As it turns out - as this story describes, windows only needs TWO (2) services to run:

Although you have to kill stuff in a specific order, and in a special way (as described), you really only need system and csrss.exe. Everything else is crap! Another downside is that not everything will be working. For instance, you won’t be able to log off or shut down. You can’t access other machines on a LAN - but hey, I didn’t say it was useful information, just interesting. This site describes how to kill almost all services and be still running windows:
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/07/running-windows-with-no-services.html

If you want something a little more useful, this site describes how to turn off un-necessary services in windows, and what those inanely named services are for anyway:
http://www.beemerworld.com/tips/servicesxp.htm