Unknown memory allocation

Very very long time lurker here, I'd say going back to 2005. Anyways I've finally been hit with an issue I can't seem to troubleshoot.

Before I post the issue I guess some background: I've been a system admin/helpdesk administrator throughout the last 10 years across NT/03/and 08. I usually read this site to gain insight on various troubles users might encounter on the day to day since I left the hell that is retail helpdesk behind years ago. I have your usual suspects for malware removal, logging, etc. [Hijackthis, combofix, avira, avast, spybot, rookit revealer and a plethora of similar program I find much more efficiant] The HIDs hasn't detected any file system changes or startup changes at all...I've run basic tests on the HDD/Memory/Logic board and all have come up clean. From what I can tell this issue isn't malware or hardware related, but hey... I'm open to suggestions at this point.

Anyways, basically the task manager shows more memory being used/allocated than currently running (or even listed). The amount of unknown unlisted memory continues to increase exponentially as additional programs are loaded. The workstation this is on has no paging enabled at all in the OS, and forces most applications not to cache to the disk, but this has done absolutely nothing in association to this problem as far as I can tell.

The logs show several non critical updates/patches but honestly the only reason I was made aware of this issue was one casual day of using firefox (and its wonderful 1.4gb memory leak on my system) I never noticed any abnormalities until the memory flag showed up that I was running out of space. That said, I have no way to timestamp when this started happening.

Now I could easily re-image the system... but where's the fun in that? I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas as to what might be causing this.

Here's a picture of the running processes... feel free to do the math yourself: http://i.imgur.com/krjqw.png

Edit: (OS = XP Pro SP3, and wireshark shows silence on the network)

 

It would seem for some reason my post is deleted... So I'll try again.

Very very long time lurker here, I'd say going back to 2005. Anyways I've finally been hit with an issue I can't seem to troubleshoot.

Before I post the issue I guess some background: I've been a system admin/helpdesk administrator throughout the last 10 years across NT/03/and 08. I usually read this site to gain insight on various troubles users might encounter on the day to day since I left the hell that is retail helpdesk behind years ago. I have your usual suspects for malware removal, logging, etc. [Hijackthis, combofix, avira, avast, spybot, rookit revealer and a plethora of similar programs]. The HIDs hasn't detected any file system changes or startup changes at all...I've run basic tests on the HDD/Memory/Logic board and all have come up clean. From what I can tell this issue isn't malware or hardware related, but hey... I'm open to suggestions at this point.

Anyways, basically the task manager shows more memory being used/allocated than currently running (or even listed). The amount of unknown unlisted memory continues to increase exponentially as additional programs are loaded. The workstation this is on has no paging enabled at all in the OS, and forces most applications not to cache to the disk but this has done absolutely nothing in association to this problem.

The logs show several non critical updates/patches but honestly the only reason I was made aware of this issue was one casual day of using firefox (and its wonderful 1.4gb memory leak on my system) I never noticed any abnormalities until the memory flag showed up that I was running out of space.

Now I could easily re-image the system... but where's the fun in that? I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas as to what might be causing this. The only key abnormality I see is an unusual amount of ARP requests from my system to the router (40-60 a minute).

OS = XP pro SP3