If the obvious

settings -> settings manager -> session & Startup -> general -> Automatically save session

way does not work,

sudo mkdir /etc/xdg/xfce4/kiosk

sudo nano /etc/xdg/xfce4/kiosk/kioskrc

taken from
http://askubuntu.com/questions/250630/how-can-i-turn-off-xfce-session-saving-system-wide

env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 /usr/bin/skype

Being blessed with a hp 8470w with an AMD radeon ubuntu provided fglrx works quite OK.
Having some rendering issues with synaptic and chromium.
Installing fglrx-pxpress hold around 5W less power usage according powertop.

Well, windows has a registry, linux has .profile.

zope.session is sooooo slow and z3c.language.negotiator calls it for each message to translate if set to session.
I fixed that. Now z3c.language.negotiator can have a cache on the request. That brings up to 1/3 speedup on an average page. Just make sure you set cacheEnabled to True.

Recently activated a smallest windows rackspace cloud server (512M RAM, 20GB disk, win2003 server 64bit).
Performance is a lot better than expected. After login the server has still over 250M RAM free.
It's a 4x Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2374 HE (2.2GHz, 7GHz IMC, 512kB L2, 6MB L3). CPU slices are capped, but still.
SiSoftware Sandra

Benchmark Results
Aggregate Arithmetic Performance : 26.28GOPS
Dhrystone ALU : 28.87GIPS
Whetstone iSSE3 : 23.7GFLOPS
Benchmark Results
Aggregate Memory Performance : 9.33GB/s
Integer Buff'd iSSE2 Memory Bandwidth : 9.25GB/s
Float Buff'd iSSE2 Memory Bandwidth : 9.4GB/s


They also have some serious disk subsystem: