[shenfei]

I have a question, hopefully an easy one, about how internet explorer works in general, and a problem I may be having with it. I just reinstalled windows XP on a new computer. I don't have anything elaborate that's continuously running, except for Norton Ghost and AVG anti-virus. I have the web-surf stuff turned off on the AVG. I don't think it used to work this way, but I've noticed that internet explorer is really slowing things down. It gets particularly slow when I surf around a site like Ebay, with a lot of graphics. The part I don't understand is that the memory usage, which usually starts around 40 or 50 MB, and continues to go up as I go to each page, goes up to around 120-150 MB. Once it gets around 100MB, it starts to slow down a lot (my computer only has 750MB of memory). The part I don't understand is that if I turn away to another page like Google or something without graphics, the memory usage still stays up there. It doesn't come down until I close the window. This doesn't seem right; on other computers, when I go to another simpler page, the memory usage immediately scales down. Does this mean that it's holding the graphics in the memory, or something? If so, is there a way to fix this? Or is this normal? I know I could get more memory for the computer, but I'm reluctant to because it doesn't seem like that's the problem at hand.

Thanks for your help!