system resources

[Me - Atlantic]

On my desktop running 5.10 (Breezy), I have evolution mail and a gnome
terminal running.  Firestarter is also running (in the system tray), and
I have 3 gdesklets on the desktop (RAM, ETH, DISK).

I notice when running top that python is using 850m of virtual ram.
Can someone tell me why python is the dominant process (7 times higher
than Xorg !) with only these other user processes running?

Is everything in gnome on Ubuntu dependent on Python?