Update! I think WLM had tied itself in a knot. I ended up finding a 1.7GB file called Mail.MSMessageStore on my C drive, which I renamed (and also renamed its backup). Re-ran WLM and let it reconstruct the file, and now that file is only 10MB and the memory-usage problem has gone away (although wlmail.exe still uses about 130MB by default).

I noticed this morning that my PC here at work was a bit sluggish, so I checked my processes' memory usage in Task Manager. Windows Live Mail (which I use primarily for newsgroups) was using over 100MB of memory, so I closed it, waited for the wlmail.exe process to disappear, and reran it.

I didn't do anything else - it has been sitting idle at the inbox of a POP3 account in the background for about twenty minutes. I haven't even focused the application.

Here's what my Task Manager looks like now:

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... and five minutes later (while typing up this post):

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I suspect there may be a problem! What do you think? I'd post to the newsgroup about it, but I think I'll need to upgrade to a 64-bit platform first so that WLM can access enough RAM to post! :)

Here's one last screenshot (in the time it took me to set the categories on this post and type these last few sentences):

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