Thank you, BR. That makes sense. And, btw, also thank you for moving it to its own thread!
I have used the tasklist to output the list of the processes for both a) 'Normal' Mode (when Calibre 4/5 won't run) and b) Safe Mode (when it does), then subtracted B from A and here's the result, the difference (I used descriptions to make it more comprehensible):
Code:
Vital for the Windows Service AMD External Events Utility
atiesrxx.exe 928 Services 0 2я904 K
atieclxx.exe 1392 Console 1 4я568 K
Windows Explorer
explorer.exe 1572 Console 1 68я356 K
The Desktop Window Manager. This is responsible for the graphical effects
dwm.exe 1664 Console 1 31я956 K
A generic process which acts as a host for processes that run from DLLs
taskhost.exe 1812 Console 1 9я676 K
Synaptics' TouchPad
SynTPEnh.exe 388 Console 1 6я036 K
Intel stuff
IAStorIcon.exe 1492 Console 1 17я856 K
IAStorDataMgrSvc.exe 3588 Services 0 14я180 K
LMS.exe 912 Services 0 3я804 K
UNS.exe 1120 Services 0 8я932 K
Microsoft SQL Writer
sqlwriter.exe 2396 Services 0 4я380 K
Microsoft Network Realtime Inspection Service
NisSrv.exe 3528 Services 0 1я716 K
AMD's Catalyst Control Center
MOM.exe 3740 Console 1 5я372 K
CCC.exe 3088 Console 1 4я156 K
Associated with the .NET Framework
PresentationFontCache.exe 4052 Services 0 15я368 K
Unfortunately, none of these look dubious or non-essential to me.