Hi, I installed Fedora Core 5 on an old laptop. I had to install it in the text based installer since Anaconda required too much ram. I unchecked the gnome and office and productivity suites but after the install I still have a lot of gui packages such as nautilus, totem and a large number of kde libraries. I really dont think I need any of these since im planning on using XFCE or no gui at all. But seeing how my computer is low on memory and cpu power I want to make sure I dont have extra packages and processes slowing it down. I already tried a "rpm -e nautilus" but it always comes up with other programs that need that package. Rather than just rip out each packet one by one, a very tedious process, is there any way I can remove all the packages I don't need.
I would still like X.Org and a functional X window system so I can try XFCE. I also don't want to accidently cripple my system. Does anyone have any idea?

If your drive space is OK, then you don't really need to worry about it much. These programs may need to use a gnome or kde library, but the library will only be loaded if you run the program.
If they do bog down the system when you try one of these programs, then don't use it. One caveat is to check if one or more of them preloads during boot up.

Ergh I know this is a stupid question but how can I check the running processes with a terminal?

Use "ps aux". See the man page ("man ps") for info about the options.