Windows runs a dickload of services, some necessary, some not. A service means stuff that runs in the background and does some useful thing for the system - for example, Windows includes a few services to handle your networking, like wireless setup, grabbing an IP automatically, etc. Symantec Antivirus installs a few services so it can always run in the background.
Anyways, services are handled by the Windows program svchost.exe . To see which services you have running, go to "Run..." in the Start Menu (or hold your Windows key and press R) and run services.msc . It'll show a list of all the services currently running, what they do, and it'll allow you to stop/start them.
That said, I doubt any of yours are spyware unless the spyware installed itself as a service. I'd recommend getting Autoruns (
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint ... oRuns.mspx ) to see what's set up to run at startup (it displays services as well as regular programs), and also Process Explorer (
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint ... lorer.mspx ), which is like ctrl+alt+del on steroids and will show you *all* of what's running on your system with more details.
You can Google the name of a process if you don't know what it is; there are sites out there where you can check what the hell it is and what it's for.
If you wanna dig in thar reel good, check out Process Monitor (
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint ... nitor.mspx ) which should show you file and registry activity on your system, and finally FPort (
http://www.foundstone.com/us/resources/ ... /fport.htm ) which shows you all open network connections and which process they belong to. Sadly it's only a command-line utility at this point. Here's a howto page:
http://www.ibiblio.org/security/articles/fport.html .
Additionally, phalluses.
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