FYI, I tried LitePC and successfully removed quite a bit of Windows XP cruft. The free trial lets you remove some things, but it's the pay version that really lets you slim things down. At the moment my C:\WINDOWS directory is under 500MB. And that includes IE7!
Here's another resource that looks VERY helpful, but far more manual:
http://www.bold-fortune.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=229
http://www.bold-fortune.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1093
I used his advice to further trim down XP's memory footprint my disabling some services that I couldn't outright remove using LitePC. So now I have only 18 processes going at bootup (and that includes the several Parallels Tools processes) and a commit charge of only 75MB. For comparison, my BootCamp system, running under VM, has 28 processes and about 130MB commit charge at bootup. I'll bet I can slim down some more.
It's not all perfect though, so let me warn you. I'm having trouble with Quicken 2007's Internet update feature now---it causes it to crash. Obviously, that's a bad thing. But I'm not entirely sure it's all LitePC's fault; I see the exact same problem occurring for other people. Even uninstalling and reinstalling Quicken doesn't help. I strongly suspect that if I did a clean XP install, THEN used LitePC or the above guide to slim things down, THEN installed Quicken, I might not have had this problem.
Therefore, if you're going to try and develop and aggressively slim XP VM, I would do the following:
--- Create a new VM with a fresh, fully activated install of XP SP2 and all the latest hotfixes
--- Make a copy or snapshot of that VM
--- THEN slim it down
--- THEN install any applications you want.
--- Be prepared to cycle a few times if you accidentally delete something your app needs.
System Restore could be your friend here---but you're going to want to remove that too! So I say having a backup of the full XP VM is the best avenue. If you're really ballsy, remove Windows Update too.
Last edited: Jun 21, 2007