How did you get this value of 138meg?

I read it in the process list of gnome-system-monitor.

Are you looking at Memory (last column) or virtual memory?
Memory = Resident - Shared.

I was looking at the column named 'Resident memory'.

You need to subtract the Shared memory from that number to get a less inaccurate indication of memory usage.

I agree that 138meg of memory seems a lot for the Resident memory, but its not an accurate enough measure to access whether there is something wrong.

Here are a link to explain memory usage on linux and why its not such a simple matter as looking at this output

http://wiki.marandcustomsolutions.com/space/Linux/Understanding+memory+usage

This is almost a year old now, I am going to call it dead.