For service information and tweaking, visit
Black Viper.
He keeps everything quite up to date and it will certainly help you weed out all of the junk that you, and most people for that matter, don't need running.
To answer the last question that you posted, a big resounding YES!!!
I have come to appreciate a lot of the added features of XP but the one that I HATE is that damnd Fisher Price interface and all of the fancyass fade in and fade out crap. Turn most if not all of it off and you should get a much snappier system.
I have systems as slow as a Celeron 366 @ 550 with 384MB RAM running XP Pro and as soon as I turn off all of the useless crap, it runs just fine. Not in modern games of course, but everything else just clips along fine.
One other hardware question. What are you running for a hard drive? If you are still using a 5400 RPM drive, I would suggest getting a 120 GB or larger @ 7200 RPM with 8MB cache. The Western Digital and the Seagate are neck and neck, the Latest Maxtor Maxline 3s are technically better but I have no idea on cost. Otherwise, they are as cheap as dirt and it would put a serious boost into everything that windows does, considering that it loves to page out to the swap file a lot more than I like.
Just also though that if you don't mind running a second hard drive in your system, as in you can afford it, It should make some varying degree of difference, depending on the application or function, to move your swap file to the other hard drive. Don't use too slow of one as it could obviously be counter productive. If moving the swap file does not produce a noticeable benefit, you could always use a second drive as the storage location for games and other large programs that require a lot of disk time when they do start accessing the disks. This way the OS and the other programs would have exclusive I/O time on their own drives. This option is certainly WAY better than RAID 0.
Good luck!!!