What they need to do is ban people from loading spyware onto your computer without your permission.
great idea....no Brilliant idea
Having said that, Micro$oft and modern CS theory deserve a lion's share of the blame for bloat: Why do today's PC's, which are 8,000+ times more powerful than home computers of the 1980's, actually take longer to boot? My ancient Apple IIe, sporting a 1Mhz 8-bit 65C02 CPU, kicks the snot out of my 1.8Ghz Althlon when it comes to simple, practical tasks like booting to a usable state, or even loading a Word Processor. All the bells, whistles and (as you mentioned) spyware are killing PCs, and we expect far too little from them considering the (useful) processing potential.
Go into the Registry, search for "RunOnce", and then navigate to the key right above it ("Run"), and you'll get some idea of what gets loaded when you start up. Anything over 5 or 6 items is deadwood, eating cycles and bandwidth, and compromising your privacy.