My hunch is that these updates didn't really incrementally add
significatn additional disk space. They were just changes and patches
to existing things. Going to the effort to identify non-critical
updates won't really do that much to affect the change you want.
Rather than remove the updates, remove *applications* that you don't
need via the control panel application "add or remove programs and
Windows components". By all means, delete all the things you don't
need. This will clean out any non-critical applications provided by the
udpate service that you now want to remove.
However, to temper your expectations, simply creating more free space
won't necessarily do anything to improve system efficiency anyway,
especially if you have some free space now available. Check that you do
indeed have swap space defined, and clean out temp file use (via the
disk clean up tool). Also, defrag your disk.
I would expect others will chime in on this thread to advise URL's of
documentation for how to improve performance. I don't have this
information at hand.
Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.
rms