Internet Explorer 7 has great RSS reader features based on the Windows RSS Platform but I have seen it degrade over the last few months as my number of subscribed feeds and new posts has increased.
Every morning when I get to the office I have a few hundred of unread items to go through, see sample statistics from msfeedicon to the right.
I have a pretty modern Dell XPS m1210 machine with 2 GB of memory and as I start reading these feeds Windows starts to trash and finally totally goes nuts. Just watch the images below, which I will guide you through.
To start with, when starting the morning with a cup of coffee the only thing I start on my Vista Ultimate is Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7, which takes approximately 50% of my memory.
Then when I start reading the feeds, Internet Explorer starts to consume more and more memory and the CPU is going wild, until Windows Vista stops showing menus, content of windows etc.
Just look at the Task Manager below. You can see, at the yellow arrow where I start to read my feeds how the memory usage steadily increases until there are no more free memory (white and red arrows).
As the memory usage increases Vista and Internet Explorer acts more slowly and slowly until you have no other option than to kill the IE process, look at the image below and the blue arrow what happens then.
I think there are something fundamentally wrong with the feed management in Internet Explorer 7, I have not investigated it more thoroughly but I will send in a support case to Microsoft and see what will happen. My guess is that there are some leaks in the XSL transformation process.
Do you have the same experiences with Internet Explorer 7?