james, david: apples and pears .... while david reports to loose 800 MB in commit charge just by opening the VE you tell us abot (loosing?) 32 MB when loading solo strings.
i wrote, that i could fix a similar issue david had removing a collection with obviously corrupt data.
some mac guys tell us they notice increase of the _inactive_ memory (i posted already a link to what inactive memory is) - so where is the common denominator?
sorry, either i'm too blind to see it or there is none.
each operating system has some sort of memory management which can in mosT cases not be detirmined by an application.
i would exclude reasons like chipset, memory, processor (except it is really faulty of course, but this would be another story) - more interesting would be *features* like pre-fetch, running services, pagefile settings and this kind.
see the thread about XP giga and memory management: defined situations give defined results, and even those differ between identical machines sometimes. we should choose a more systematic approach, because you have to know i'm not the engineer responsible for setting up your machines guessing your details - i can run a defined series of test on the few machines i have under my control and we can discuss issues, ideas and solutions here.
thx, christian
ps: of course a screenshot with all relevant information from activity monitor/taskmanager helps ...