Hogging Physical Memory On Bootup

for a coupla months now but it finally got to me last night, my Vista 32bit PC is hogging my physical memory on bootup---seems like forever. my light on front is constantly on. i ran through a lot of tests last night to see whats up. i did see major spikes in my resources moniter. but i could not see or find what was useing it up. my physical memory showed 65% usage. i managed to do some windows updates and reboot which helped. i also ran chkdsk for my C hard drive.(i have 3 hard drives total). since it rebooted without me there, i assume the C hard drive may be ok.