We are having a significant memory leak on browser based forms that use the Rich Text boxes with IE7. When we switch views it adds 35K of memory to the iexplorer.exe process and this memory is still pinned even after closing the form popup window. As the users use our system and run close to the memory limits the window/Form Services either crashes completely, takes the CPU utilization to 100%, says it ran out of memory, or gives a few other random errors. The end result is our users cannot save and lose their data they were entering. This problem is easy to duplicate and we opened up a case with Microsoft who also verified and duplicated the problem.
MS said the fix will take time because it happens within the core .dll modules of IE7. I don't understand why a memory leak that can be easily duplicated at MS is not a priority. It is not like we have another option for a multiline textbox. The only other option doesn't support paragraphs so everything that is typed in shows up as one big paragraph. Or we could switch to Rich Client based forms instead of the Browser based forms, but that would require architecture changes to our system.
If anyone has a suggestion let me know. We had to upgrade all PCs to 2GB of memory (cost of $35,000) to minimize this issue but users who do not restart their IE7 often still run into this issue.