Since this isn't
strictly silence-related, I thought I'd put it in Off-Topic.
The problem: Asus software has a memory leak.
The story: Noticed something had eaten up a lot of RAM while playing Bad Company 2. Typically the consumption is high, but this time over 80% of my 8 GB were gone. I quit the game, quit Steam and ran the cleaner I use to keep Windows afloat, but the consumption wouldn't go below 3 GB. Exploring the task list showed that the Asus service had gone from the typical <10 MB into gigabyte-fraction territory.
The solution: The temporary solution was to simply restart the service and claim that .5 GB or more,
as suggested by this article. The long-term solution is to use Speedfan and get rid of the dozen-or-so Asus components and their leak(s?).
Hooray for Speedfan! ... although the configuration interface is still stuck in the 90s.