The Windows Waste Of Being Overly Helpful

I recently put my 8 gig flash drive to use it for my Xackr efforts. I noticed at startup my machine immediately started doing something that was eating enough machine cycles to slow down my computer considerably. I opened Task Manager to try to determine what was running and running my machine down. The culprit? Windows Media Player was doing something hot and heavy. A little further digging and it turns out it was indexing the 8 gig flash drive that is nothing more than a portable apps drive. Did I need it indexed? Nope. Was I even WANTING to run Windows Media Player? Nope. Now multiply my machine times every other machine that has a flash drive installed that is being indexed at startup needlessly and unasked and you see monopoly programming at it's worst - wasting probably megawatts of electricity. And Windows Media Player is just one small example. It seems like almost every application I install follows Microsoft's lead and tries to install things that run in the Task Tray at startup rather than waiting until I actually want or need it to run. This "pushing" us toward what they want versus just helping us do what we want is at the core of corrupt computing. It is this kind of thing that makes Ubuntu and OS X more attractive as there is a lot less "background noise" on both of those operating systems.