@ Orpheus:
If you wanna get a decent boost in speed, get a WinXP MCE SP2 CD, remove all of the MCE bullshit, and all of the useless processes/components either manually or with nLite, apply some registry tweaks (disabling paging of the kernel, etc), disable every service you aren't gonna use and set ones that you might end up using to manual, install bb4win, disable explorer and get a light-weight filemanager. I say XP MCE because Microsoft used quite aggressive compiler optimizations on it to get it running faster on lower-performance HTPC's. That's as fast as you'll get Windows going without programming your own replacement Windows-compatible libraries and using them with BSD.