<p>Starting with 2005, VS started this behavior of when starting debugging session it spawns up a webserver for every project in a solution.  I have a solution with 15 projects so it takes a while and is a waste of resources.  Is there a way to configure it differently besides just using IIS?</p>

Some details here on why it does it and how you can overcome it:
http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2007/12/tips-tricks-start-up-options-and.html
There are instances when you might have many web applications or web sites in the same solution and you may be actually debugging only one of them...  In such scenario it might not be desirable to have multiple instances of ASP.NET Development Server running...  VS provides an explicit setting in the property grid of web application/site called Development Web Server - "Always Start When Debugging" which is set to True by default...  If you set this Property to be False only one web server instance will be created for the start up web project...