Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Running Windows with No Services

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Running Windows with No Services: "

Minimal Windows: the only two processes, not including Task Manager, are System and Csrss.exe

This is astounding - and opens up all sorts of possibilities for optimising Windows.

More interesting still is the discussion in the comments about state-of-the-art viruses and how hard it is to remove them.

Very cool stuff.