Here is what I did.
Put my taskbar icons to not group (and be full size), made my icons on the taskbar and deskop both small icons -- the large icons are HUGE and I don't see the point
Disable services:
-Windows Defender
-Superfetch (if you have 8gb of RAM and you never use over 4gb at a time, don't disable this, but if you have 2gb you DEFINITELY want to disable it, and I'd say the same if you have 4gb too but that's up for debate. This makes a huge difference, and hardly increases your load times unless you have some old ATA-33 hard drive).
UAC -- I disable it. Without it, it wouldn't let me change my monitor refresh rate, and something else. I don't get a lot of prompts with it in Windows 7, but to an advanced user especially it's the most useless feature. It really isn't much less secure with it off -- viruses have been made to get around it since before Vista's launch, but it will keep some older viruses from finding their way into startup.
I also do the IE8 menu bar tweak, although I use primarily Opera.... just a personal preferance of mine.
I will keep looking for other tweaks, but disabling two services makes this OS perform much like XP for the most part, and a couple of other tweaks and I'm good to go -- which means less time spent doing tweaks and more time installing programs and games!
