Haven't rebooted yet, still doing research and maintenance (time-shared with household chores, drat).
Based on advice in the O'Reilly WINDOWS XP ANNOYANCES book, I've just used RegEdit to enable ClearPageFileAtShutdown, which forces rebuild of pagefile at startup, avoiding defrag. Is 1.5x RAM the optimal pagefile size? I'm at 3x now.
I think I have the startup load pretty small already. I've trimmed-off a few that don't look absolutely necessary. [slight delay] Hmmm, I think I'm ready to reboot the Toshiba now. Let's see what happens...
EDIT: SUCCESS! At least, the ghost CD drive is gone. Now I just need to tune-up the performance so it's actually usable. THANKS!!
Last edited by RioRico; 05-14-2012 at 11:03 PM.