I puled up the KDE system guard and it says that ALL of my 192MB of ram have been used up and it is also working on munching up about 100MB of virtual memory (swap?)... what the heck is going on?

what kind of services or programs do you have running.. ?? memory will usually be filled almost to the max in most cases as linux will load as much as possible into ram...

Linux unlike windows takes an advantage of usage as much memory as it could, hence the memory management implemented on linux is much better than it is on windows, don't worry about it, and disable the services that run on startup which you don't need.

Doesn't a standard distro packed out with all the nigglies only use about 175meg when you first boot into kde? once applications open it goes up from there..

Well, your question was seriously lacking in detail. maybe you could tell us a bit more about:

OS
System
programs running at the time
etc etc.

have you tried doing a 'top' command as root? give that a try and see what's taking up your resources.

However, all that is relatively moot as Linux will almost always expand to take up useable resources. The difference between Linux and Windows (which also will do this in a big way) is that Linux will flush the RAM on an as-needed basis to make room for incoming system calls. Windows on the other hand will let apps (such as outlook) soak up all available memory, then refuse to release it to newly called programs, thus necessitating a reboot.

Is your system running slower than usual? I bet it isn't.