Adam over at Lifehacker points out a very interesting little study conducted by Oli at ThePCSpy.com called "What Slows Windows Down?". Although it's only one independent test, Oli went to great pains to explain his methodology and show that he gave each piece of software a fair shake on a brand-new system.

Oli used a clean installation via a VMWare virtual machine to test the performance of a number of common software suites to determine which of them has the biggest overall negative impact on Windows performance. While I'm not sure many people would be surprised that Norton's Internet Security suite topped the list (by a huge margin), the next worst thing that you could have installed on your system is 1000 or more fonts.

Personally, I love this list, and just wish that he had the time to test every piece of software that I currently use, as well as competitive software so I could find the best-performing options. But in the absence of that "wishful thinking" list, I'll take this one. Thanks Oli!