Memory leak in OS X when working with images

Hi Forum,

I'm working on an application that opens and closes a potentially large number of images (up to 1000 images at a time).  The app reads the files from disk, attaches them to the stage, and then later releases them before processing another set of images.

When profing the app I can see the objects coming into memory and then being released appropriately.  The graph and values of the memory usage shown by profiler suggest the application is behaving properly and releasing the memory as expected (the objects disappear from the list in profiler and the memory usage shown by profiler descreases).  But the real memory displayed in the system's activity memory continues to grow to 500+MB (when profiler is showing < 100MB).  I have tried several combination of Adobe Runtimes (2.7, 3.3, and 3.5) and Flex SDKs (4.5A and 4.6) and the system memory continues to increaase.

The memory stays low and in the expected range when the AIR application is run on Windows XP and 7.

I'm wondering if anyone has experienced an issue where memory usage is much higher (by several hundred MBs ) on OS X vs. Windows when working with images, and if so, what approaches were used to lower memory consumption on OS X.

I can provide graphs of profiler vs. system memory in OS X if that would be helpful.

Thank you in advance for your help with this issue.