Windows 7: IE8 eating up tons of memory

Hi all - I am running Windows 7 on an Alienware desktop dual-booted with XP. In Windows 7 IE8 eats up tons of RAM and performs very badly (but no issues in XP). Here are my system specs and screenshot of taskmanager. Please let me know if you have any idea.

thanks,
bob

System Manufacturer/Model Number Alienware Area-51 5500 R5 OS Windows 7 CPU Intel Core 2 6400 2.13Ghz Motherboard Intel D975XBX Memory 2GB Graphics Card(s) nVidia GeForce 8500 GT Sound Card M-Audio Audiophile 2496/Intel on-board Monitor(s) Displays Acer 21" Screen Resolution N/A Hard Drives Samsung 230GB ATA
WD 500GB ATA

I suggest using Firefox or Google Chrome as an alternative. They perform much faster than IE8.

As for your problem, my IE8 takes up about 60,000 K so it isn't much of a problem. The 500,000 K process IS a lot but I have no answer for you. 2gb of RAM is a decent amount. I have 4gb and my computer usually uses up half of that 90% of the time, via the Sidebar's CPU and RAM usage Gadget. Your computer could use some more RAM. That will improve your machine's performance overall.

The only solution I can think of is to reinstall Internet Explorer. If that doesn't do the trick, try a different browser or remove some applications and processes running in the background.