Honestly, guys...

Am I just removing paint, wordpad, and extra languages to make the XP footprint smaller and have a nice install disc, or am I actually making XP run faster?

Seriously now -- no BS please!

it won't make XP faster, the only way to make it faster is to remove some service you don't need (network, printer, ....)

@ronmanp - you can also just disable the services

Anyways heres two similar threads (to what the OP is asking):

Increase performance with nlite

Technical reasons for nLite improving performance?

fmo its make the xp run faster and even more with weak cpu

After using nLite for a long time, I can definitely confirm there is big difference whether a component (service, driver...) is not present or just disabled. On boot (but also on MANY other occasions) windows enumerates and lists what it has, so obviously the less components - the better. Also, often during these enumerations, windows actually loads these files (usually dlls) that in turn load other files and do other things. It's the way windows works.

That's my experience (not scientifically measured, but consistent every time; seen with process monitor which I use a lot).

GL

*Edit* Also, don't forget the reduced size of the registry and lesser number of files in the %systemroot% (C:\Windows) directory. However mighty computers are, these operations (searching for a registry key or for a file) are performed many times per second.

the desktop speed alone is worth it

the benchmarking speeds probably aren't changed that much, but it's noticably faster imo