[koolmeme]

Cube, 640 MRAM, etc, yadda ...
running iTunes, IE5, Office, BBEdit,
AS/FaceSpan, Dreamweaver 4, MacPerl,
Toast 4, MRJ 2.2, DVDPlayer, etc.

occasionaly MacOS starts eating (leaking?) memory. the "About" memory panel shows the OS steadily taking up more RAM (from the normal ~80M). i usually notice this when the iTunes equalizer starts skipping tho it is apparent in most applications. a reboot "fixes" it. i check per process memory usage (via AS) and don't find aberrant data. any idea what initiates this behaviour?

[Moonray]

It's most likely a bug in iTunes then if you tracked it down to occur exactly when you use it... It's simply a bug. Memory leaks happen if applications which allocate memory on runtime don't free it properly. It shouldn't affect anything else but your free memory and all you can do now is trying to avoid to call the leaking function too often and to hope for a bugfix.
A prominent memory-leaker was the Appearance Control Panel in OS 8.6... didn't get fixed until 9.0.

And yes, it's annoying.

-