Stop stealing my memory

Why on earth do applications have to install a load of crud that runs all the time when I rarely use the actual applications? iTunes has got iPodService and iTunesHelper and I don't even have an iPod. Photoshop Elements has got two processes running and Google Desktop Search has three! In the case of Desktop Search I can understand it needing one process but why on earth does it need three? So please application writers, remember your app is not the most important application in the world and if you really really need to have something running all the time, how about making it one single process?