The first things I thought of were the daily, weekly and monthly UNIX maintenance scripts that OS X schedules and runs in the background. But that's perhaps a minor example. Your question got me thinking. Running through the back of my mind when I wrote that was, I think, the sheer number of in-your-face blue progress bars and stuff-is-going-from-this-to-that icons that Windows throws at you, whether you're deleting, copying installing, virus scanning, whatever. The graphical defrag window is an obsessive-compulsive's dream. There's also dialogue boxes galore (especially with the default firewall that runs in XP) and icons in the Taskbar that are a constant reminder that something is happening, like the network icon—is data flowing into my computer? Now that I think about it, OS X has a lot of these things too, but I guess the difference is that they are much more discreet, and that the interface is not organised around making you have to deal with them so much.