also clean the junk out regularly i've been using cr@p cleaner for years

www.ccleaner.com

To my mind, in the same category as Apple (perhaps slightly worse, if anything) is the Real Player.
This gets removed from my system toot sweet. A very suitable replacement can be found at free codecs dot com (also available at several mirrors, including File Hippo. The player looks a little sixties, but it works, is light, and doesn't spread tendrils through all the nooks or crannies, pester you for more toys, or ask if it's bum looks big.
A version is also available for the files the Apple player takes care of.

Realplayer i dont have a problem with, i just disable it from the start up registry, but then i hardly use it anyways..

the one that sticks in my craw is symantec products.. banned from all my computers they perpetually run in the background and the frigging symantec updater is a pest. all symantec/norton products are removed from any system 'tout suite'.. The anti-virus is useless... previously i stumped up for the corporate edition, what a waste that was, and it wasnt cheap either..

.. ended up with more viruses than 10 dollar crack whore. AVG does a better job.

Kaspersky rules !

Jeez, Wayne, I know how to spell tout suite.
I'm from the antipodes.
We take the piss out of anything.

awww heck and i held back on sheep jokes ! :E

What Mac The Knife said!

But, in furtherance to that: there is no way to reclaim memory which was supposed to be deallocated by any given app aside from rebooting your system. The improperly deallocated RAM will remain in Limbo, so to speak.

Mac: later version of FF are indeed better at handling RAM BUT I still often see a huge memory print when opening and closing several tabs, over extended periods of usage. And closing FF does not always free up the RAM it was using. I think Mozilla as an organization needs to expend more resources in addresses FF's memory demands. (This is not the behavior I see when using Apple's Safari though!)

Wrong.

If an application is leaking memory then killing that application will free up the memory, given any sane operating system, which all the ones you're likely to come across are, mostly. The operating system knows what memory is assigned to any application and frees up that memory when the application terminates even if the application doesn't do it for itself.

It's only if something in the operating system itself, rather than an application, is leaking memory that you're likely to need a reboot.