On my system Vista x64 takes about 1.4GB of ram after the boot, but that's because I have 8GB. If I take 4GBs out, initial usage is 700-800MB. But that's the point, memory is there to be used, that's what it's supposed to do. It doesn't do anything good if it just sits empty. If there is need for more memory it will free what it doesn't need. XP takes much less ram after the boot, but that doesn't necessarily means it's better, it's more that it doesn't know what to do with it. XP is 9 years old, when it came out 256MB was a lot.

I switched to Vista one and a half year ago just because of poser. I was pure luck that I tried vista back then, but I noticed something interesting with it. I was rendering animation back then, quite a lot of animated scenes and I was using XP. Around that time I gathered some courage to install vista and see what the fuss was about. I finished playing with it but it was already too late so I just ran poser, loaded a scene and let it render over night, with return to XP delayed for the next day. Next morning I was surprised, it finished rendering, that same scene (content and length wise) took more time on XP. So I started few more scenes and noticed the difference. Under XP poser loaded textures and all that what it does before rendering for every frame, rendering took about a minute per frame, and all that prework took 3 minutes. Under vista first frame took the same amount of time as XP, 4 minutes all together, but every frame after that took only a minute. Texture loading and prework just blinked, and it immediately started to render. I guess that's just because of the way vista uses memory in comparison to XP. XP was made for different amount of RAM in mind, it loads what it needs, do with it what was asked for, flushes it and waits for new task. Now memory is relatively cheap, amount that was norm for XP is kinda ridiculous now, so why not change that philosphy and keep stuff in RAM untill that space is needed for something else, it's also way faster than 9 years ago so flushing it just before it's needed is fast enough.

As for Red ants™, I guess that's normal for IDL at the moment. Some models increase render time exponentially when IDL is used. I toyed with two scenes, both had one character and both were interior scenes. One had all doodads that interior scene should have, chairs, table, and 2-3 more props. Other was more simple (free supermarket model I got from somewhere), and most objects in the scene were just cubes, and variations on that theme. First scene took about 10 hours to render, second one took 15 minutes, same lights were used in both. After that I gave up on IDL. I could have deleted everything from first scene and then slowly add stuff to see which prop caused all these trouble but I didn't had the patience to do it.

P.S.

Ressourceovervågning is Resource Monitor on english Windows. :)