CaveDiver When you say DE can be killed, please ellaborate.
Is this a service or an EXE.
I have a good deal of experience stopping and starting services on need.
And don't really see much dificulty in EXE's either.
Should be easy enough to script the starts and stops, and use Task Scheduler to do the rest.
Perhaps that would allow a power hungry system to sleep a little longer, and also not Balance at prime viewing times.

My concern is if the MSS is in the middle of a balance and you stop the service.
Will it cause corruption.
I can put this together and post it tomorrow if someone wants to test it.

This also begs the question why there not a Scheduled DE addon.