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I think the idea behind prefetching is that information about repetitive operations can simply be saved to a file that is later read and directly transferred to memory when those operations are set to be executed again. Usually when you boot your computer the system configuration does not change from boot to boot. What windows does is it observes the boot process and records data in the prefetch files for use in subsequent restarts. The same thing applies to loading applications. When you start an application a series of instructions is executed from the point you launch the app to where the user interface becomes active. The results of those instructions does not change (unless there is a change in the apps startup procedure). To speed things up even further windows defrags and moves these files (and possibly others) into a continous portion of the hard drive that can be most quickly accessed.
I agree that the defragmentation and layout portion of things will not make a difference to CF users, but if the above is correct, the prefetch portion of things should cut down on load time of system components and applications into memory. The trick is getting windows to generate those optimal prefetch files. Good luck.
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