If you've ever taken a look at your Task Manager program and said "Why are there 20 things running, I am not even doing anything", there could be a few reasons for it.
One reason is that even as it appears that nothing is happening, there are a lot of background jobs (or processes) being run - for example, there is a program keeping your Internet running, another likely monitoring for viruses, etc.
However, there are other times that you end up with processes that just take up RAM and are not necessary.
The site ProcessLibrary will tell you exactly what those processes are, if you put in the name, whether it is necessary, and perhaps most importantly, if it's spyware or a virus.
http://www.processlibrary.com/
