Let's try to keep the threads on topic. If you wish to discuss random topics please do so in the General forum. Thanks.

I was about to say... that's the most interesting response to a question I've had yet. But back on topic:

First, before I go turning off everything on my system I just want to confirm that sshd isn't required for me to use ssh, sendmail/smtp isn't required to send/receive mail with mail clients, the cups daemon isn't required to use CUPs to print, and the X11 thing is only used for allowing remote logins to X and nothing else. The first two I'm pretty sure about, but it sounds from a description I read that CUPs was required if I wanted to use CUPs to print, and I was confused about what exactly making those changes to startx is going to do.

Second, I went into Slack's pkgtool to turn off services and now the only ones I see at startup are gpm, apmd, inetd, and sysklogd. I know I need/want gpm and apmd and sysklogd looks like something that's supposed to be there, but how about inetd? Do I want to keep that on?

Thanks again for your help.

All the services that you are turning off are in fact daemons which means that they are servers and they serve. You can disable the sshd service on the computer but you can still ssh out from that machine to anywhere else. but you no longer can ssh INTO that machine because it is not running the sshd daemon and the same goes for the rest for them

You can still recieve and send mail as long as you use your isp mail servers.
Those changes that you make to startx will not affect any functionality.

inetd is a like of big service that runs sub services or you can probably disable it and it would be fine, it runs a whole bunch of r* services telnet etc and stuff like that that most people dont use anyway and if you come to need it just re-enable it. There is nothing in disabling any of these services that will cause your system not to boot. maybe the startx one.
Be careful not to delete anything else in the startx file.

I appreciate the explanation. Time to go turn some things off...

If you wanted an easier way to turn them off you could have just

su
pkgtool

under pkgtool goto setup
x services
then you could disable them and if that still doesnt work

chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.service like ssh and what not

yeah definitely go the pkgtool route if that works, dont know i've never used slackware
but i wouldn't recommend doing the chmod -x cause the files remain and its bad administration practice for later. and you have to look up the attributes later to check is this service running or not rather than just looking in the rc.d folder.