I wouldn't quite call 50 processes mad or insane. If you have enough ram and a multi-core processor, there is no reason for alarm. My rig which I use for everything I do (designing, coding, gaming, browsing, movies, music, etc) has about 42 processes on start up. I'd say about 10 of those are programs I used very frequently, be it Skype, steam, lcd on my keyboard manager, extensis, version cue, gmail, trillian, nod32 etc. If I was benchmarking my system to get every last bit of strength out of it, I'd close down everything etc. But for every day use, convenience outweighs the minimal FPS gain or the 3 seconds saved on loading times.
Now my mother-in-law's stock Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop that had 85 processes running at start up....now THAT is a problem.
