you are quite correct on that aspect. I use the full object desktop shell on my machine. The desktop components running are desktopX, objectbar, wfxload and wbload. These 4 components take up about 26Mb of ram. However I am not too concerned cos memory is dirt cheap at the mom and my comps have 320 and 160 mb resp which is more than adequate.
Pointless extra: everybody thinks that windowsblinds is a huge memory hog. In my case it only uses .6mb which in comparision is nothing.