Help running a very lean OSX

Wondering if anyone knows how to change the way OS X boots? Specifically I want to run the bare minimum and nothing else. I assume there is a script somewhere that tells the OS what to load. I have looked in etc/rc but that just seems to handle the low-level stuff. I would also like to know what is essential to run the OS (ie kernal_task etc.) and what I can eliminate (i.e. cron, cups, etc..) Any ideas/links would be appreciated.

thanks.

 

Sorry, I am still using panther for now. The reason for this is at work we are having problems recording for long periods of time. Using Audiodesk(which very well could be the problem), after about an hour it kicks out of record mode saying the cpu was overloaded. In addition to tweaking the recording software I was hoping to get OSX down to the bare essentials for recording, i.e. no networking, maintenance, or whatever etc.. Kinda like the old extension manager days of OS 9 I want to free up ram and avoid stray cpu hits.

 

Well, after a bit of digging around in terminal the answer seems a bit obvious now. So much for thinking is was going to be complicated. There are a collection of scripts in System>Library>StartupItems which load various things. By default there are 33 items, which I have reduced to 5 after a bit of experimentation.

Not that I recommend anyone trying this, so don't, but this is what I have left:

AuthServer
DirectoryServcies
Disks
LoginWindow
SecurityServer

At one point I deleted everything except loginwindow and disks. The machine would not boot into multi-user so I put back the other 3 and it boots just fine. I still haven't traced down all of the processes I want to kill, so back to work. Will be testing this all out tomorrow.

In response to Krazykrl, the issues I am having are not limited to a specific mac/HW configuration. I have used different FW hard drives, different audio interfaces, different macs. I think it is either a problem with the audio software or with os x's processes. I'm sure someone has been caught off guard at 3:15am by the daily cron script.