I know it's possible to stop it switching, but I want to know why it is using too much memory otherwise it's just papering over the cracks. Every so often I will get a notification asking me if I want to switch to Aero Basic because it's using too much memory, and sometimes it will just switch itself to basic and let me know why. This is the same while running the exact same applications (currently Zend studio, FireFox (with firemin - low memory usage), Outlook). His dwm.exe is running at around 30mb, mine is currently running at about half a gig, though it does fluctuate quite a lot. My colleague and I both have 4GB of RAM, Core 2 Duo, blah, blah - essentially they're pretty capable.

I understand that dwm.exe is for (simply put) caching bitmaps for things like Aero-peek and similar, but as far as I have read it shouldn't be using vast amounts of memory. I've scoured the web, but I'm sick of reading 'scan your computer for viruses' and 'upgrade your RAM' on answers to similar questions to this.

Window manager dwm