Non 'Plug & Play' driver list

With the recent spate of Starforce threads doing the rounds I decided to check out my hidden Non Plug & Play drivers.
To my suprise I have over 80 entries:



I can recognise some of these entries (such as AVG antivirus and SpeenFan) but I must say it's a little worrying that SO MANY items are hidden away and I have not got the foggiest what 90% of them are doing.

Can any of you guys with a clean XP install do a count of your hidden non plug & play drivers and see what you get?

To get at them:

* Right-Click My Computer and choose Properties
* From System Properties choose [Hardware] tab
* Click the [Device Manager] button
* In the device managers menu click View > Show hidden devices
* Expand the [+] Non-Plug and Play Drivers

My installation is not too clean but there are only 45 entries.

3 of them are StarForce -.- no idea how they got there, maybe windows update?

'Secdrv' is another copy protection driver (Macrovision SafeDisc)

A good number of them are perfectly normal -- they are a bunch of generic drivers that allow windows to interface with certain 'crucial' hardware, e.g:

The PERC ones allow your computer to talk to a PERC RAID controller, those ql-something ones are for QLogic RAID adapters, aic* , aha* and dpti02 are Adaptec RAID drivers IIRC, the ones starting with Sym* are Symbios RAID controller drivers, etc... So the majority of them appear to be harddrive controller drivers.

Even if you don't currently have one of those in your system, windows will always have the drivers available so you have the option of booting from such a device. If windows didn't already know how to talk to them, it would grind to a halt almost immediately after the boot process started. These are devices that windows needs to know about at boot time, otherwise it won't even make it to the point of detecting & installing them later on.

Then there's a bunch of generic network drivers, AGP bus drivers to be able to talk to your video card, and more.

Excellent replies. Much appreciated. Thanks in particular to xlsior for all the indepth details.

Anything look out of the ordinary?
I know what Sandbox is. Its from the superb Sandboxie tool.

NOthing immediately apparent as nasty malwarish dodgy stuff, but there's a few items there I havent a clue about:

Sparrow
giveio

to name two of them, Il have a hunt around and see what I can find out for you!