I'm running vista with no problems, just ditch the visual themes switch it to windows classic, disable all the fancy animations and drop shadows and it runs as smoothly as XP imo, it just takes some customization to get it working how you want
Yes, don't used so much "fancy" function provided by vista..it's totally sucked and ignore it is much easier
Number of processes should not matter it's the resources they are using up. I mean I have a clean linux machine right here running with 100 processes. Big deal they're all using no cpu and such a small amount of ram it's meaningless.