After paying A LOT for a Dual Core Athlon XP2 computer with 2gb XMS Corsair RAM Memory and 76GB 10,000 rpm WD Raptor hard drive, I felt REALLY mad when I could see a small delay in opening programs like Firefox, Word, Photoshop, etc... so then I did countless hours of research to find the best feature/performance I could get.
nlite is a program that strips your Windows XP installer (by this, I mean many features werent ever installed instead of stopping and/or removing them). My windows XP Pro went a diet treatment by removing:
Themes (Classic Theme is only available)
Old Drivers
Wallpaper
Windows Media Player
Windows Movie Maker
Animated Character for Search
Windows XP Tour
Screensavers
Games
Language Pack
Help
System Restore
Windows Update

now there is less crap loaded on my computer at startup and lest processes running and the windows folder is smaller than usual.
Only things remaining in my windows XP install:
Applications:
Calculator
Defragmenter
Drivers:
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)
Battery
Bluetooth Support
Brother Devices
Display Adapters
Display Adapters (old)
Ethernet (LAN)
Firewire (1394) Support
IBM Thinkpad
InfraRed
ISDN
MultiFunctional
Multi-port serial adapters
PCMCIA
Ports (COM & LPT)
SCSI/RAID
Sound Controllers
Toshiba DVD decoder card
Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)
Internet Utilities:
ATM Support
Client for Netware Networks
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer Core
MAC Bridge
NetShell Cmd-Tool
Network Monitor Driver and Tools
NWLink IPX/SPX/NetBIOS Protocol
Outlook Express
Tcp/Ip Version 6
Operating System Options:
16-bit support
Administrator VB scripts
Application compatibility patch
Command-Line tools
Disk Cleanup
Extra Fonts
Floppy Support
Jet Database Engine
MDAC
Out of Box Experience (OOBE)
Printer Support
Web View
Services:
Application Layer Gateway
Background Intelligent Transfer
COM+
DHCP Client
Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC)
DNS Client
Event Log
Internet Authentication (IAS)
Logical Disk Manager
Management Instrumentation (WMI)
Message Queuing (MSMQ)
Network DDE
Performance Logs and Alerts
QoS RSVP
Quality of Service (QoS)
Service Advertising Protocol
Shell Services
SNMP
System Event Notification (SENS)
System Monitor
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
Terminal Services
Universal Plug and Play
Volume Shadow Copy
Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)
Windows Time
Wireless Zero Configuration
I took a step ahead and got the Norton Corporate Anti Virus, its is 12mb only :shock:
Well, now my computer is exageratedly fast