More of an observation than a question.. My ten year old Win 7 Pro desktop has been getting a bit sluggish lately. Turns out it's Sidebar.exe hogging all my spare RAM. I've got 4 Gigs installed and Sidebar.exe was using up to 3 Gigs of it.

I didn't notice that though until, for the first time ever, I got a small popup window telling me that it was using lots of RAM and asking if I wanted to shut it down. It's related to desktop gadgets.. I only have two small ones, a weather forecaster and a tiny network throughput monitor.

Anyway I shut it down and then restarted it as suggested and it's back to what's normal using around 35K of memory. Doing google searches it seems this specific memory leak has been an issue with Win 7 and sidebar for years.

Now that I'm home all the time self isolating I'm not turning my computer off every day and just putting it to sleep when I'm not using it so I'm guessing that was/is the cause of the problem. I'll just have to turn it off more often to reset/clear RAM useage.