A cool little program which monitors and somewhat dictates your running processes is Task Catcher.

Task Catcher allows you to efficiently monitor programs running on your computer without slowing you down or hogging all your memory. Task Catcher will block unwanted programs from running and restart your favorite programs if they are disabled or crash.

You can read more about this free program (and see a screenshot) here. I can see this being used primarily to make sure key processes (such as your security programs) are always running. The blacklist function, while certainly nice, would be a big hassle to maintain unless you specifically knew the process names.Overall, I think this is a nice utility. It is from the developer of WinPatrol which I have nothing but positive things to say about.