IE 7 Using Ridiculous Amounts of RAM

[ad_ept]

Hi. I'm running Vista 32-bit, and I've noticed that recently Internet Explorer 7 has been hogging crazy amounts of my RAM. It usually makes no difference how many tabs I have open. For instance, I had 4 or 5 tabs open a few minutes ago, and the program was using about 520MB of RAM. Now I have closed all but two of those tabs, and it's using 540MB!
If I close the program and open it again, it usually reverts to something more reasonable, but somehow seems to gradually get up to this sort of crazy amount again.

I only thought to check on it because the sidebar memory usage gadget used to display as about 30-40% of my 2GB, but more recently it's been hovering around 60%.

Any ideas what could be causing this? What can I do about it?
I'm a bit worried that I could have some sort of Trojan or malware.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[notherdude]

Interesting. I tend to agree that something is wrong. Vista uses 'superfetch' to aggressively pre-load frequently used code into RAM, (as you may already know), but when you close IE it should close and not show up as a running process even if it stays in RAM. Also 60% seems like a lot of RAM consumption when the system is idling - my system keeps the RAM at more like 30 - 40% filled.

Just to be sure we are talking about IE and not 'explorer' right?

 

[ad_ept]

Yes, IE. When I close it, it does immediately free up the RAM it was using, but it's all a bit weird.

It's funny, because it doesn't happen all the time. I restarted the program a while ago and am now running with 3 tabs open and it's using about 97MB. Why was it using an extra 400MB for fewer, similar tabs before? Crazy.

 

[notherdude]

Well IE does have it's issues, as do other browsers - I'm no expert but some sort of occasional memory leak or script run wild might account for this.