ekrn.exe very high memory usage

I've got a machine which starting acting slugish over the past few days; got in to look and I see it's low on memory now. Just (finally) upgraded the machine from Nod32 Antivirus version 2 to version 4 this past week and ekrn.exe is running at 226,224k of memory. This is quite a bit higher than before with version 2.

Short of doing a reboot; is there any way to reduce the on-going memory footprint of ekrn.exe ??

I disabled all of the run-time protections with no change at all.

Currently running Nod32 Antivirus 4.0.467.0 w/ sig database 4649.

Thoughts / Suggestions ??

Update: I suppose the issue isn't just how much memory it's using, it's that it seems to creep up over time. Sometimes at a rate of 1M every few minutes. There were no system scans going on; just typical system usage...

 

Hello aqtech,

File-level scanning of some email servers, backup software, gaming applications, etc. can occasionally cause abnormal system behavior. You may need to exclude specific applications or folders from being scanned.

WARNING: Excluding applications or folders from scanning removes an additional layer of protection. We recommend you only exclude trusted or secure files.

For illustrated instructions on excluding those files/folders from the real-time scanner, please click or copy/paste one of the following Knowledgebase articles into your web browser:

http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN2153