this isn't related to X/KDE but I've been using slackware 11.0 2.4.33.3 kernel and noticed something odd, at bootup/login top shows 64m in use, an hour and half later, it shows 130m in use and all it's done is sit there, so something is leaking badly. if i load X and exit, my 64m suddenly shoots to 248m and won't give it back, which isn't very good considering the system only has 393m of ram, leaving it sitting at a prompt for 12 hours and i have 21m free!
Haven't had it hang up tho, have noticed that when the memory is full i can't go to websites anymore heh oh yea another odd thing, i have yet to have it use the 500m of swap. is that normal?

also to the guy who said something about windows and 24 hours filling the memory, i've been running windows xp pro sp1 for quite a while, if i leave it sit for a week, it stays at the same 168m memory usage. heh if i use clubbox tho it quickly fills up the memory and pagefile tho.. yes i know nothing to do with linux but i saw that and had to respond. most i want to know how to fix this memory leak and where it is, this is a really basic system with most services disabled, iptables not even setup yet..

I'm running XFce4 on Slackware 11 (2.6.18), I'm using the JFS file system (thanks for the suggestion, H_TexMex_H). My Plll 800 IBM unit has 768 MB RAM,it never goes into swap, and it doesn't use a lot of system memory.
I've noticed that KDE uses up much more RAM and CPU cycles than XFce4.

@ Tsunku

So, you're saying you're not using KDE ? What wm are you using and what programs do you have up ? Run 'top' and sort by memory usage.

I don't see a point in comparing things to Window$. From my experiences with it, it's a worthless POS. For example, my mom's laptop (running Slackware, of course) is now using no more than 50 MB RAM on average. Of course, the more you use something like FF and openoffice, the more it increases. But just so you know, when it was running XP, when it booted there were exactly 40 MB RAM free. Total memory is 128 MB. And, yes, it was pretty much completely unusable at that time, even after fresh install.

Can we stop this Linux vs Windows war? This time the problem is not closed source or Microsoft politics, but poor coding. We must admit, that Linux has its flaws too and these should be fixed.
IMHO, the kernel can cause some problems but I doubt that the kernel api which X uses changed.
Did you try to run any other wm?
Talking about KDE, I've managed to get linux running from USB stick more than a week. Nothing hung up. Neither KDE, nor kopete.

Try Ion wm. Have heard that it doesn't eat RAM.