Ever wondered what happens when you remove a device or plug in and then remove your usb device, well here it is. It seems that XP leaves a ghost of incorrecly installed devices that may eat up resources. I discovered 4 copies of both of my monitors, 10 hard drives 6 mice , now that they are removed i am actaulayy seeing more respose in xp.http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-ghost-devices.htmlHave a readDo at own risk. Basically anything that is greyed our can be removed.And for those who have erratic slow downs, it seems that svchost.exe can actually have a memory leak, something to do with auto updates, had a friends pc that would suddenly just die a few minutes after boot, svchost would be running at 70%, when i killed it everything would come good, there is articles on M$ about it

Placebo and mythBeen there, done that, tested it.. years agoThe only way removing those items -may- (mind you ----> -may-) make a performance change is there is a conflict present by ACPI/Windows/old Driver or device and that is rare.Some clean that out as a practice and habit. I don't however from time to time when I may be looking for a strange problem I will dump the cache just to be sure. I have only come across one instance it made a difference and it was not a frame-rate increase, it was a controller configuration issue.