Certainly, checking over your services and never letting anything that isn't running be set to Automatic is basic administration. In fact, the Technet thread I linked to was saying, unless you need the Task Scheduler it can be turned off.
But, since two copies of it are running on his system, I'm assuming he needs it for something. Being a "scheduler" I'm assuming it probably is looking to the chipset APIs to find timing information. Updating the chipset drivers seems like a good idea, as they may be causing other problems you haven't seen, yet.
Also, Vista's reliability monitor would be a great feature, if it worked. Of course, it doesn't, though. It sees "WHQL Certification" as the most likely candidate for it's random spew of messages. Never mind the fact that the last WHQL driver is more than a year out of date, and designed for a product family that has less features than the device you own.
Vista's driver choosing algorithms kept insisting that the "best" version of my sound drivers were over 100 revisions out of date and did not support more than 2 channels. I'm sorry. I kind of LIKE surround sound. I only had this feature working correctly for the past 3 years in XP. This oversight might be more understandable if I had a rare audio chipset or something. But my workstation runs one of the world's most popular audio chips, the Realtek AC'97. Gah!
And don't even get me started on the moronic "reliability monitor". That thing started spewing advice after a system halt. The system halt was quite clearly my fault, and was caused by me trying to force an install of an XP game that didn't quite like UAC very much. Vista's reliability monitor concluded that my HP Photosmart printer driver caused the crash! How silly of me to blame the old game I launched moments earlier! It's clearly the driver for a printer (that was currently off) which is causing all the problems. (slaps forehead)
And again, I don't mean to make this into a diatribe, but I've got a lot more stories like these. There are a good number of other people who are quite versed on the current Microsoft Way that hate Vista just as much as I do.