Awhile back I came across the program to control your windows processes.
You can find it on your Windows XP machine under the name SC. Either use your command prompt or Start->Run.
DESCRIPTION: SC is a command line program used for communicating with the NT Service Controller and services.
I ended up using it to shut off VMWare Processes. My computer is a little on the old side, and everything I can cut down on helps. So I created to .bat files.
vm_start.bat:
sc start VMnetDHCP sc start "VMware NAT Service" sc start vmount2 sc start VMAuthdService sc start vmserverdWin32
vm_stop.bat
sc stop VMnetDHCP sc stop "VMware NAT Service" sc stop vmount2 sc stop vmserverdWin32 sc stop VMAuthdService
I run these to start/stop services only when I need them.