Agreed, never use them especially ones that are as badly written as these seem to be. The way in which applications use memory is down to the application software itself, not your PC which sounds fine.
Perhaps you remember the funny one about the man standing on a desert island with the usual single palm tree and the sharks swimming around. There was some kind of inter-action possible but I've seen it crash a Win95 machine remorselessly with the loss of all that valuable stuff the secretary had spent all morning on but had not saved...
Wallpaper OK, screensavers that interfere with the processor Bah!