Deffexor

Thanks for the link MagicAndre, that's rather insightful. Guess I'll have to also mark it to never install. Though I have to say, that's f'ing weird...

Backstory: Recently I installed Vista x64 Ultimate SP1 (OEM) edition on my new PC. So far, I've generally been impressed with Vista SP1. The only thing that's been killing me is that the OS quickly becomes very "bloated" with stuff. [Minimalism is a virtue. And plus it makes backups go faster... ] Part of this is due to Volume Shadow Copies (System Restore, etc.) and this can easily be handled with the "clean-up" function. But part of this is due to Windows "winsxs" (or Windows Side-by-Side) folder, which was Microsoft's answer for "DLL Hell". For those not in the know, Vista apparently keeps a copy of every revision of every DLL (and whatnot) so that individual applications can co-exist without stomping on each others resources. Unfortunately, this is where the "bloat" part comes in. Problem: Since Vista is a bit of a resource hog, vLite is naturally a breath of fresh air in keeping one's Vista installation "tight". In particular, the Microsoft Natural Language search function is one of those things that pretty much will never get used by people with even half a brain, yet it hogs up 1GB of disk space. Since it's not really needed, I've elected to remove it with the assistance of vLite. Here's the funny thing: Microsoft's patch (KB955020) makes my Vista install increase in size by nearly 2.4GB! (The patch itself is a 60MB dictionary update to add the words "Obama", "Friendster", and a few others...) When I look in the "Winsxs" directory, there are 8 folders each at a size of ~300MB with the names all involving "Microsoft Windows Natural Language"!!!! As I mentioned, I removed the "Natural Language" feature from my install with vLite, and here it is back again. So what to do about this? I've reproduced this problem in a VMWare machine: I've tried both the normal Vista x64 SP1 as well as the vLite'd version (without Natural Language) -- Instead of letting Vista install the whole slew of patches, I installed just this one patch. I don't know if any other patches trigger it, but it's the only one that I've tested so far that does this? Has anyone else experienced this? Is the solution just to not install this dictionary patch?

I've come to the same conclusion... Ideally, I'd like to be able to copy all the printer drivers off to a CD-R or DVD+R or put them on a file server. (saving 750MB on my install.) This way when Vista needs to find a printer driver, I could just point it at a directory and it would install the required driver. Anyone know how to go about doing this?

Perhaps I should have mentioned that I use an old HP 6MP. Apparently HP doesn't host this driver on their website because it's already included in Vista. Therefore, removing all the HP Printer drivers from Vista prevents me from installing the driver automatically. Is there a way to automatically download this driver from MS?

Vista seems to have 750MB worth of printer drivers. I surmise that I'll never use any of them except for perhaps 1 or 2. If I remove ALL of the drivers, will Vista then try to search MS's online repository of drivers to download my printer driver? (Or will I have to download it from my manufacturer's site and manually install it?)