46 processes may be a little excessive, but it's not unusual. Once you've sorted the current maintenance issues, you could go into msconfig, select the startup tab, and disable everything you don't need to run at startup.
As to how to know what should run or not, that's another story, but generally all security applications should run, anything else is usually down to user preference.
FWIW I have 36 processes running, and 6 out of 13 startup items listed ticked.