Thanks very much guys. Milhouse, I completely agree with you about the Memory applet report being bogus information. I'm inclined to clone that old bug report and open it again.

p.s. You pointed out other ways to get more info about the memory use, but in case someone is looking for a graphic app with a bit of info my search turned up "DiskUsage" here:
http://www.anderenen.de/anderenende/maemo.html