Well considering I have a game running, aim, musicmatch, and firefox running I have 33 processes. Then my DFP driver is running, and windowsblinds is running, motherboard manager
I think windows uses from 25-27 processes default.
Press Ctrl+alt+delete and sort by "mem usage" to check which is raping your computer, no windows process except explorer.exe (Desktop+start menu) and svchost.exe should take more then 10 000K IMO
if you sort by CPU, that's what your computer is current processing. I have a game running alternating from 6-15 and firefox 0-6 depending on if I'm typing or not. Musicmatch is using 0 and it just switched songs, but every now and then hits 2, so basically just look around. Kill a windows process and your computer will either go into emergency shutdown (Timer of doom) or it will just not let you kill it.
Damn, long post, sorry.