virtualbox.org

After upgrading VirtualBox from 4.2.0 to 4.2.4 on my Win7 64 Pro, I am seeing excessive RAM usage. The fault is not VirtualBox itself, but a svchost.exe process related to netman (Network Connection Manager). Usage at Windows startup is normal, but this svchost.exe process continues using more and more RAM. Stopping the "Network Connections" service stops the usage from increasing further. After removing VirtualBox, this behavior goes away and reappears after reinstalling VirtualBox again. Throughout this process, I never open the VirtualBox GUI, nor do I have any guest VMs on this system. I assume this has something to do with the "virtual network adapters" that VirtualBox creates. I tried uploading a screenshot of process explorer, but the forum has a very small attachment limit.

To localize the problem, could you try
1. Installing VirtualBox w/o bridged networking support (deselect "Bridged Networking Driver" component in the component selection dialog of VBox installer) and see if it solves your problem
2. Installing VirtualBox w/o host-only networking support (deselect "Host-Only Networking Driver" component in the component selection dialog of VBox installer) and see if it solves your problem
3. Installing VirtualBox w/o both host-only and bridged networking support and see if it solves your problem