Unfortunately, this will always happen to a greater or lesser extent with Windows 95 / 98 / ME. - Win 2000 manages memory much better.
I had similar problems recently and did a bit of research and discovered that there is a bug in Win ME with regards to Outlook express. - If you have lots of emails in your inbox / outbox and bin (especially with lots of attachments, then when you come to close Outlook express, it won't give back the resources to the operating system. Microsoft are allegedly working on a fix for ME for this, but I wouldn't hold your breath if I was you.
I improved the situation by doing some serious spring cleaning in my mail folders and upgrading to Outlook express 6. You should also prevent any unnecessary programs from loading at start up: After boot up, press ALT-CTRL-DEL before anything and count the programs running. If you have more than 8, then I'm sure you can get rid of a few. Do this by running 'msconfig' at the command line and unticking unneccesary programs in the startup tab.
I seem to remember, like me you have had a few problems of your USB ADSL modem dropping the connection ? I found that by doing the above, the situation improved drastically.
Hope this helps.
Brit
