On my old computer, which headed single-mindedly westwards some weeks ago, I had Poser 7 and Vue 6 running on 32-bit XP.   Minimising either Vue or Poser was a genuinely effective way to recover memory.   Restoring the application window would cause Vue/Poser to re-acquire quite a bit of memory, naturally, but, overall, memory was released.

  I now have the same Poser and Vue running on 32-bit Vista.   When I minimise either application, the quantity of memory held by it barely changes at all.   This isn't a matter of what Vista grabs for its own purposes, because the big numbers are assigned to Poser/Vue, but it does appear to be a problem with Vista, since it is the operating system that has changed.   OK:  so have the memory itself, the CPU, the motherboard and the driver software, but this looks like a Windows problem to me.

   Has anyone else seen this memory leak in Vista?   Does anyone know of a short-term response (akin to the minimising which worked well in XP), please?

Attached Link: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/Help/596FB57F-CC9D-4AC5-A813-5C0830E9156A1033.mspx

I run Vista 64, I don't see a memory leak!! One thing you need to remember is that Vista utilizes memory in a totally different way to previous versions of Windows. It has a sytem called Superfetch which allocates memory depending on your software use, in other words it has "intelligent memory handling" Microsoft has some very good expalnations and tweaks for it on their site. This link may help you!

i think it was mentioned, maybe by fixer actually, that if you have all the bells and whistles of vista on then you lose 1GB of your RAM straight away,

so how much RAM have you got?
and did you just change your OS or did you upgrade the whole computer? wondering why if you got a new comp why you didn't go 64bit version, which would of allowed you to access more RAM.

i think it was mentioned, maybe by fixer actually, that if you have all the bells and whistles of vista on then you lose 1GB of your RAM straight away,

In some case Vince it can go as high as 1.5, exterme case though! Vista also has this "thing" where the more RAM you have, the more it will take for the system, if you have less it takes less, weird stuff!!!

I was told Vista is a memory hog -whatever that means- ,but can I reduce its hunger for memory by simply switching to a classic windows-interface mode ,as often suggested for winXP ?

Switching anything off that you don't need/want will save memory!
First thing I did was switch that damn side bar with clock and stuff off, totally not needed IMO!!
I haven't really done more than that myself because I have 8 Gig RAM so it's not really an issue for me but for those with less, I'd look at microsofts site [link above] that telss you how to optimise Vista for better performance!

Thanks for the suggestions.   I had been planning to get hold of a new computer with a 64-bit OS and enough memory to accommodate Terminal 5's baggage backlog, but my old computer gave up the ghost out of the blue and I ended up buying a bit of a stop-gap, which has only 3Gb.