[masraum]

Originally Posted by john70t

(fwiw I am a user not admin)
I brought up the Windows 7 Task Manager typing cntrl+alt+del:

1). Most of the memory leeching Processes I'm currently able to stop.
Adobe Flash seems to affect this computer the worst, but only appears along with GWX.
There is a "Access Denied Error" when trying to stop it.

2). There are many Services running.
When trying to stop any of these, there is the same "Access Denied Error" as well.

So how does one get rid of these extra Services?
The computer is very sluggish.
Whenever I try to simply rename or move a file, the computer memory will lock-up and randomly "deny it" for 10-30 seconds.

You'll need to be admin to kill a bunch of that stuff. Don't indiscriminantly start killing stuff off unless you are sure you know what'll happen. There is a tons of crap that runs for all of your OS and apps to work the way you expect. If you start randomly killing stuff, you could shoot yourself in the foot.

GWX is irritating, but shouldn't be that big a problem memory-wise.

You'd probably get better help if you could export your list of processes (or a screen shot) and post it for us to see. You'll probably get pretty good recommendations of what to kill and what to keep and someone may even spot something that's likely to be an issue.

Is this a personal PC or a work PC?

Is this PC normally connected to a work network, vpn, just a home Internet connection?

Give us more info and maybe we can help with some specifics

Based on the info that you've provided, user not admin and when you try to close stuff, it pauses for a while before giving an access denied, I'd assume this is a work PC and when you try to close things, the PC is trying to authenticate you as someone that should be able to do that and either can't get to the necessary resources to authenticate you (hence the long wait) or is just really slow talking to your DC or whatever is denying your access.