I have a very strange issue, which I'm having a hard time diagnosing as to the root cause. I have a Mac Pro (2008, 8-core 2.8 GHz, 8800GT) with 14 GB of RAM (recently upgraded because of this issue!). When I boot my system and log in, vm_stat / top / Activity Monitor will show that kernel_task has about 150 MB allocated, and the machine has about…