Thanks, I think it might also be a function of how many tabs I had open plus the fact I was using three different browsers, some of which use flash and shockwave. I always have problems with flash and shockwave and last night I even had a blue screen that called ATMDF.DLL or something like that which caused the blue screen- it's an Adobe file. SE doesn't use flash or shockwave at all does it? I'd prefer it use Quicktime since that seems to much more stable. Why do so many sites use flash and shockwave?Depends on whether you're running all those apps on the same hard drive. SE does not use an internet connection, but it does read and write some data from the hard drive, as do web browsers, so if they're all running simultaneously on the same hard drive then they will slow each other down somewhat. But it shouldn't be a big problem, unless you're short on RAM. 3 browsers + SE requires a lot of memory.
Right now I have 4 GB RAM which is the max for this motherboard, but the OS can only use 3.25 GB of it.
I'm not sure if Task Manager properly shows memory allocation, it said that SE was only using 40 MB of memory while the browsers were each using much more.