Looking further through the information here. The optimization guide is the most thorough that I have seen although some of the details are BIOS/MOBO specific. None the less, the BIOS optimizations can be inferred from what is presented. It looks like they have the answers to my “essential services” questions (plus networking, of course). This will keep me busy for a while. 
cPlay will only work with ASIO devices, but I wonder how the cMP shell would perform with EMM. cMP’s memory utilization and audio thread CPU exclusivity look really interesting but might take some tweaking to get going. I almost wish that I wasn’t traveling later this week so I could get my “geek” on and play with it now. 