You know, rather than go through the whole list, the easiest way to learn the content of all those background processes is to go to http://www.processlibrary.com that is managed by UniBlue. This is a huge database of known process files with a search engine. You can type in the name of the process or *.dll, and the search engine there should find your process and tell you what it is - who made it, and so forth. There also is a little JAVA applet that can be downloaded from this site, and when installed, used to either identify a process, - or more importantly, you can use it "on top of" your Task Manager to re-assign a priority to any single or set of associated processes in your Task Manager. Its' default setting is to Launch Upon Startup (thereby adding one more background app) but as a Java app, you can just delete it from your desktop so that it doesn't do this. Then, it will still be in your Programs|Startup list for your occassional use. The reason I mention this is that I see you are a Norton user (good!). But Norton necessarily load quite a lot of background processes into Windows to keep you safe. I said I disable my firewall and antivirus when running a Vue render - but only when I've physically disconnected myself from my internet connection, and then I always re-invoke all those before connecting again, of course. In your case, you cannot kill the 7 or 8 'always-on' Norton processes (Norton protects you against yourself by making these processes impossible to delete), but you can change use the little java app from ProcessLibrary to lower their "priority" so that they execute in as few cpu cycles as possible. Of course, you'll want to have no physical connection to your internet while you're doing this, and you'll want to restore the priority of these processes once you've finished with Vue. You can use this little app to lower the priority of other background processes as well, so its worth adding this one more little app to identify, control, eliminate or reduce the priority of a lot of other background processes while using Vue (or in my case, my 3D modelling program.)