[John Rogers]

You mentioned Adobe and HP and their services are huge pains in the butt! In those cases you sometimes have to go into the registry and delete the entries that cause them to auto start. In the case of Adobe and it's reader, once you open a document it will auto start the update service and check so you have to go and delete it again!

There are others too and if you are using Symantec as your anti virus software it will show up when Chrome downloads some new version of a DLL and it will pronounce it "safe" always! As for Chrome, look at where the cache and temp drives are and keep them away from C: if at all possible. Also make sure that if you are running a 64 bit OS then make sure ALL the apps are also 64 bit and if you are still in 32 bit mode consider moving to 64 bit as that makes your data path twice as wide.