Vista Annoyances

• Even though I don't use Windows Defender and have it disabled (to the extent that it is possible), I still get a Windows Update message every couple days telling me that there's a definitions update for it.
• Every so often, the CPU usage of the System process will go way up. Rebooting doesn't seem to help, but temporarily unplugging the battery does. When the System process has high CPU usage, the computer becomes very unresponsive, taking a long time to open programs and whatnot. Eventually, it seems to go away on its own.
  
• I have a backup program that syncs my computer with my wife's desktop machine. It is set to run on my laptop at 3am, and to bring it out of sleep mode. I have the laptop set to go to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, but whenever I wake up in the morning, my laptop is still on, and hasn't gone to sleep.
• There are a lot of processes running when the computer is doing nothing. This isn't even including the 7(!) processes for the AVG antivirus (all of which total about 2MB, so I can't complain too much). Back on Windows XP, there were about 10-15 processes that were just always there, and I grew to accept them. But Vista adds 2(?!) Windows Sidebar processes (1 for the weather applet, the second for all the others); there are 12 Host Processes for Windows Services running, 2 WMI Provider Host processes, 2 Task Scheduler Engines (1 for each CPU?), the Desktop Window Manager, the Search Indexer, etc. I'm a pretty knowledgeable guy, but I couldn't guess what half of the services do, and it seems that if you disable them, your system fails or hangs in mysterious ways.
• I really like the search box in the start menu, but why does it take so long to get a result? It's only searching the start menu, and there can't be more than maybe a hundred items or so, yet typing in anything takes about 3-5 seconds to get a result. Come on, Vista- I've got a fast machine.