Firefox Memory Allocation problem/questions

[Old and In the Way]

I've recently (last day or so) had some 'out of memory' warnings and crashes with Firefox (FF crash, not my system)...never have had any functional issues with this browser until yesterday. My overall system is reasonably stable (WinXP), although I do get an infrequent crash. Usually with 5-6 apps running and lots of files open and doing some multi-media. Everything just stops working...a reboot always resolves.

Back on Firefox and looking at TaskManager, Firefox is #2 in memory commitment (currently 71MB on fresh boot. I'm running Outlook/Office and that's under FF @ 54MB). Teatimer is #1 @ 87MB. Entire processes currently 600MB out of 1550 Available, so I think I'm not straining the system.

But FF used to run a fraction of that...I seem to recall awhile back at @ 30MB. Is there something wrong with my install? Should I delete the current system and start over? A good, simple program to save bookmarks/settings/extensions?

Thanks in advance...

[Why Syzygy]

1. One possible troubleshooting step

would be to disabled Teatimer and see how FF functions w/o it.

http://www.malwarehelp.org/how-to-enabledisable-spybot-teatimer.html

ps. Don't visit any hacking sites while it is disabled. ;)

[Old and In the Way]

2. Thanks.....no problems since I posted

I'm thinking it might have been a systematic memory corruption issue that cleared itself after a power-off reboot. All systems go....I am curious as to what the memory allocation should be, but maybe I'd have to list all of the extensions and add-ons that I've attached to my browser to know whether this is a valid load.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

3. You may also have a bad memory stick

When that happens, you'll often see weird crashes because only part of the memory stick is actually bad. When an application uses that memory, strange things can happen (like crashes). You may be able to find some freeware that tests the memory, but I haven't used one in a long time.

FWIW, firefox.exe is currently using 81 MB of memory right now on my machine with only one tab open. On a side note, the Vista sidebar is using 710 MB of memory - holy crap, I didn't realize what a memory hog it was! Luckily, I have 16 GB of memory.