Sorry for posting again, but something new happened today and I thought it might shed light on matters.
Today when I opened task manager, B4J RAM consumption was at 800MB, nothing strange, BUT there was ALSO a "Java SE Platform binary (WYSIWIG)" (or something very similar) with around 1.2GB RAM consumption! As soon as I closed the WYSIWYG window of B4J designer, that process disappeared along with its 1+ GB RAM consumption.
I was wondering if that might be a clue as to what the heck is going on in my OS... Does this prove that the root of the problem lies in Java itself?
Also, does the B4J code editor itself depend on Java? I was thinking maybe fully uninstalling Java JDK and JRE and reinstalling would help.