HTC Desire :: Disabling Tasks From Launching?

I have got my desire for a couple of weeks now. A fantastic device with a great if a little irritable OS that needs some love and care to achieve perfection

Anyay, I'm one of those obsessive people who don't like stuff just launching and running in my OS (be it my Windows, Linux, Android, Symbian or anything else) without a good reason. I always disable any non-essential processes and applications that may potentially slow down the system and/or drain the battery.

I have only installed a couple of apps to my Desire and did not do any "illegal" stuff with it (no rooting, hacking or any other syetem modifications).

I use Astro file manager and task viewer and this is what I see just after freshly starting the phone in Astro Process Manager:

- Open Source Plugin Manager - 21.23M
- Dialer - 35.02M
- Clock - 21.88M
- Google Partner Setup - 19.89M
- BlueTooth Share - 20.52M
- FM Radio - 20.11M
- Calendar - 21.98
- People - 20.93
- Android System - 48.88M
- Swype - 25.87M
- Footprints - 22.37M
- Updater - 20.27M
- Mail - 23.23M
- HTC Message Uploader - 19.86M
- My Uploads - 20.64M
- Google Mail - 21.52M
- Settings - 23.39M
- HTC Sense - 47.62M
- Messages - 23.30M
- ASTRO - 37.26M

Now isn't that a little TOO MUCH? Especially since I haven't used any of those apps/gadgets when starting the phone and neither do I use any of my "homescreens" to place anything there (except one where I put only links that I use most often).

After I kill all apps that I think are not essential I have ony about 6 of them running (Dialer, Android System, HTC Sense, Swype). I try to kill off "messages" but it restarts almost immediatelly. The system still runs perfectly well without all this stuff running in the background.

So what is the reason for all this stuff launching? Isn't it a good idea to keep the memory empty rather than load a bunch of apps that I'm not going to use?

There is that "startup task killer" app but I wonder if there is any way to set which tasks should start/not start upon phone start-up? Something like Windows process manager utility allowing to manually disable any start-up tasks you think are not necessary. That is getting quite annoying.