sbeetle:

44 processes is not excessive- I have up to 40 running in XP Pro.

Unless you have some malware infection, having unnecessary processes might slow down your bootup a little, but would not necessarily slow down your PC's operation otherwise.

I would focus more on what programs are loading at startup; to do this click on Start>Run, and type msconfig.exe in the Open: box, then click [OK].
The System Configuration Utility will open; click on the Startup tab. How many programs are listed there?

All you really need to load at startup are your defenses; your firewall, anti-virus, and perhaps an anti-spyware program. If you use a security suite, such as Norton Internet Security, you might see a few more. If you are seeing more than this, you might have too many programs running unneccessarily in the background.

You can research the  startup programs  listed in msconfig here to see if you need them;
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

If you need more advice on how to disable programs from loading at startup, post back with:
- Your operating system
- The Anti-virus/anti-spyware/firewall/security suite or other defenses you use

Just to add some screenshots to what Joe has mentioned, for more information/details, see here:
http://netsquirrel.com/msconfig/
For step-by-step instructions, click on the link (toward the bottom of that page) appropriate for your particular Windows operating system.

Here are some additional sites that can help you research your startup items:
http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php
http://www.hijackfree.com/en/processlist/

Edited to fix HTML