Yes, spent some time with Perfmon, as expected, it was due to various system components constantly finding some reason to update/install something I have no use

Yes, spent some time with Perfmon, as expected, it was due to various system components constantly finding some reason to update/install something I have no use for. Moving Chrome profile to a RAM disk helped somewhat, as did turning off some icon update stupidity or something like that in hidden Chrome settings. But as you mentioned, if even the Start menu is lagging, I have no patience and no desire to investigate further, this is it. So instead of buying some utilities to make windows less crappy, I've finally had enough and installed Ubuntu on that last PC. Just to think about it, I was an MCSE+I and MCDBA some time ago, now I only boot windows for games.