[Touch Pro2, Tilt 2 Windows Mobile ROM Development] smuook:
There's been a lot of whining and complaining about memory leakage (without much digging to find out why or data to others). Just simply that it's the ROMs fault. Quite frankly... it's getting old. Instead of the idle complaining, why don't you actually either do some troubleshooting or provide something useful that helps people understand the issue. I have been watching my memory closely. I use battclock on my taskbar to view my free ram at all times:

I watch this continuously throughout the day. My observation is this... the "memory leaks" that I see (and I assume most people claim) are not associated with the ROM itself but rather the programs or services you are running. The application is typically responsible for the allocation AND freeing of the memory. If the programmer doesn't do this, you get a "leak". This may be for selfish reasons so their app starts faster next time... or it could be bad programming.

An good example of a memory leak (by good I mean verified and repeatable) is the WM 6.5 lock screen. If you use have this enable, and then you lock your phone, you will lose about 8MB of RAM and it won't release. It will remain in memory and may eventually make your phone unstable as you run many apps. It's not really leaking anything, it was probably designed to do this so it works quickly. I use the old school pin lockscreen because it doesn't stay in memory. True, it's not as 'gucci' as the 6.5 slide lockscreen, but it doesn't cause my phone to be unstable.

Here's some general guidance I've found on gwes.exe:

1. If you like eye candy (skins, nice icons, dinik theme, etc.), accept the fact that you are not going to have much free ram. It has to go into RAM in order for you to see it. Nicer images tend to be bigger files. YOU, not the ROM, are making this choice. Until they start putting dedicated graphics cards on these things, it's just gonna be this way.

2. Accept the fact that you will lose some memory. This simply happens over time as you operate the phone. You will have to soft reset every day or maybe longer, depending on what YOU do with your phone. This happens with the iPhone also btw. My son has a jailbroken iPhone and it "leaks" memory as well and needs periodic reseting (even when it couldn't multitask).

3. Reset your phone and note your free memory. Without launching an app, run through every manila tab and all your menus and such. Look at how much your free memory goes down. This is easy for me since it's on my taskbar. This is the normal memory buildup you will have due to running manila and your theme. Again, the more eye candy, the more you should expect to lose. If it goes down too much just from doing this, guess what? Time to downgrade your system. You are running too much stuff that uses high memory. Or, go buy an HD2.

4. Everytime you start an app or service, notice how much your memory goes down. When you stop it (or kill with task manager), notice how much it does up. The difference is your "memory leak". In actuality, it's how much that application failed to release for whatever reason.

You could easily spend some troubleshooting time and define your memory issues. Instead of just complaining that it's the ROMs fault. Then you could switch programs to avoid the problem ones. If you truly did have a memory leak due to the ROM, then you could post it here and have some actual data to support it.

A simple suggestion.