Inhibiting decoherence via ancilla processes

General conditions are derived for preventing the decoherence of a single two-state quantum system (qubit) in a thermal bath. The employed auxiliary systems required for this purpose are merely assumed to be weak for the general condition while various examples such as extra qubits and extra classical fields are studied for applications in quantum information processing. The general condition is confirmed with well known approaches towards inhibiting decoherence. A novel approach for decoherence-free quantum memories and quantum operations is presented by placing the qubit into the center of a sphere with extra qubits on its surface.