IE8 the Ultimate 24/7 headache

A while back I got IE8 as a security fix and a less RAM hungry alternative to IE7. This is true as it seems to use only 60megs of RAM on google whilst my IE7 used 135megs of RAM on google. Now I went onto task manager and saw a horrific figure: 1.15GB RAM idling... I sorted out all the RAM hungry apps but there is one process that still bugs me: iexplore.exe. Its constantly eating 60 to 70 megs of my RAM and about 15% cpu... I tried end task but it just comes back a few seconds later. For now I left it on low priority but if there is any way to get the few precious megs of RAM back I would try it...

Thanks in advance. I can't live with something like that... I just can't stand to see useless processes sap my resources and give me popups every 30 minutes because the popub blocker keeps crashing. Why did I get Vista in the first place? oh yeah. because of non backward compatible drivers....