Wine Hides On-board RAM

[Ian D. Stewart]

I have recently noticed an unusual side-effect of running Wine.  When I 
first start up my system, /proc/meminfo reports MemTotal as 256892 kb.  
After running Wine for awhile, /proc/meminfo reports MemTotal as 32680 
kb.  The system performs as if it only had 32 MB of RAM.  A reboot of 
the system resets total memory to the proper value.

My question is:

1) Has anybody else encountered this?
2) Does anyone know what causes this, or better yet how to avoid it?
3) Is there anyway to recover the lost RAM short of a reboot?


Thanx,
Ian