I really don't understand this, may be someone can shed some light on this one for me. If I am running Internet Explorer on my Windows Vista machine with 3 browser windows open (non of them have Flash) and I also have a VMWare machine open running Windows Server 2003 with 2 programs running. Why oh why does Internet Explorer use 122,792K of precious RAM and VMWare uses 27,080K of RAM? Why is it that this that even when I have Internet Explorer open in Windows Server 2003 in my VMware session on the same pages that it still doesn't use as much RAM?

Also considering that I have turned off all the advanced graphics such as Aero off in Vista.

Is it that:

• Windows Vista is badly written compared to Windows Server 2003?
• Is VMWare so magnificently written that it only uses as much RAM as it needs?
• Microsoft's QA dept didn't do the same quality checks as they did on Windows Server 2003 (great OS by the way).
• That there is an issue with Internet Explorer suffering memory leaks on Windows Vista?

I know so many people who have switched back to "good old XP" for this very reason. Some have even gone as far as using Windows Server 2003 as their operating system to get around these issues. I have read online that companies have delayed upgrading their networks to Vista until Microsoft have sorted out the printing issues Vista has which still exists in Service Pack 1.