I feel I should bump this thread to explain things away a little; it seems to have lots of search juice in it.

Linux platforms - or Unix, for that matter - are designed in a very modular way, where a great deal of software (eg: dnsmasq) is in user space as opposed to kernel space. This means that it is listed in the process list, visible to and controllable by you. Windows' architecture, to which most people are accustomed, slams just about everything into the kernel, far away from one's own control. With that design, it is not unusual for every process to be directly associated with a running program.

The result in Linux is that people always see a ton of processes in the process list. Many of those are daemons, which essentially sit there consuming next to nothing until something wants them.
One detail that people often do not expect is that these processes are absolutely tiny to begin with, and the kernel is really good at handling them so that they never get in your way.
Even a well written crawler or search indexer can shrink down to almost nothing, listening for events of interest to it.

In short: Don't worry too much about it unless the processes really are absolutely useless and wasteful. (It is modular for a reason: You can turn them off tidily!).

A question from me: What does mediaplayer-engine do? As someone who uses Canola and MPlayer for most of these things, will that serve a purpose for me?