The benefits of dual booting are huge. I don't have the luxury of a dedicated audio laptop so I also work on papers, do coding, check email, etc on my lappy. Obviously if I dual boot I'd have an ultra clean installation that I could dedicate to audio, no AV, no auto-install checkers, everything tuned for audio.
But, I'd love to work on audio while doing other stuff - when not performing. Do you install Live 2x?! once in the clean OS and again in the dirty day-to-day OS? Does that work for most software? Can you just point them both to the same project files and have them work - seems like I'm bound to run into problems where the configuration of one installation is different than the other.
If you DON'T dual boot and you use a single OS installation - have you found a way to set up a profile for performance that doesn't have all the crap running?