This is a problem that keeps bothering me.  I have a HP Laptop that I installed Mint 17 a few months ago.  When I turn on my laptop, I scan it for open ports and find stuff like cups, smbd, avahi-daemon..

I have disabled them with service and removed them from start up with update-rc.d -f <name> remove.  But when I restart my computer, they are back.  I have a desktop with Ubuntu 12.04 that I did this with and it was fine.  I doubt that Mint 17 which is suppose to be like Ubuntu 14.04, should be having this trouble.