Running Windows with No Services
A Windows service provides functionality to the operating system and user accounts regardless of whether anyone is logged into a system. Windows XP comes with around four dozen services enabled by default, including ones that many people consider superfluous like Remote Registry, Alerter, and SSDP Discovery (Universal Plug and Play). A question many Windows administrators commonly have is therefore, which services can I safely disable? What if I told you that for at least basic functionality like Web surfing and application execution, Windows doesn’t need any services? In fact, you can also do those things without system processes like Winlogon.exe, the interactive logon manager, and Lsass, the local security authority subsystem.
The following steps, which you must follow carefully to achieve a minimal Windows system, were derived by Dave Solomon through experimentation, and when he discovered that Windows was usable without all the core system processes we were dumbfounded. After figuring this out he and I polled senior Windows experts like the vice president of the Core Operating Systems Division, the technical lead of the Virtual PC team, and a lead Windows security architect to see if they thought that Windows would function at all, much less if Internet Explorer would work, without the support of Winlogon, Lsass, and services, and the unanimous answer was ‘no’. Even after we showed them the demonstration I’m about to share with you they all thought that we’d staged some kind of trick.
