http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1277699&postcount=68

Guys, I tried to explain this to Viper550 on IRC yesterday, he responded with your screenshot as "proof" of your claims, which leads me to believe that there is still confusion here.

When citing memory usage, please do not quote the stat Virtual Memory.
Please read the post "Memory Usage with smaps" here (http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_bmaurer_archive.html).

Please calculate the private RSS by subtracting Shared Memory from Resident Memory.
Also note that Application Browser is an entirely seperate process.
Please stop adding its memory to main-menu's.
If one process is leaking it is  not related to the other (unless the leak is in a lower library, but thats another story).

I hope this will clear things up.