WoW Wrath RAM Issues

I seem to be having a few problems with my machine and wotlk - for some reason, the game seems to completely drain my system. It runs perfectly fine (maxxed details, native res, capped by vsync) when I'm actually in the game, but alt tabbing proves to be a nightmare - even the simplest of tasks take an age - and the slowness dosn't dissapate until I get back to the game.

This dosn't seem to happen with any other game, and it never USED to happpen with wrath either, but I can't think of anything that's changed. I used to be able to run in windowed mode, and watch videos on media player, and have my outlook and firefox open on a hundred freakin' pages, with no slowdown whatsoever. Now, to avoid performance problems, I have to play fullscreen, and I can't really have any of those things open while playing (or at least, even if I do have them open, I can't actually use them because of the slowness). It's getting very irritating.

System specs are in my sig.

 

memory leak? play the game a bit, and the Alt+Tab (yes, it will take ages ) to your desktop and check how much RAM the game is using (in your task manager under "Processes").

 

It only started happening when you installed Wrath? Do you use any add-ons?