Turning off unnec. Vista Stuff

How in the heck do you do this? I am running Vista and when it comes to saving any somewhat large amount of data (say in excel format) it is SLOW as shit! I do the same on my home XP comp. and it takes MAYBE 2 seconds. I know there has to be a way, as Vista is a known memory hog, I just want to increase the performance of the work comp. ANY help is appreciated!

Check out vLite

thanks