i finally found and killed some forgotten piece of HP shitware that sprung a memory leak sometime within the last month or two and was bogging down my entire laptop
it was doing a good job at evading detection because, according to process explorer, it wasn't visibly using a significant amount of RAM, and blended in with the rest of the background processes that were behaving normally. it was only after i got pissed enough and turned on all the numbers that i noticed its "paged pool" count was continuously going up, like a couple of KB every second. so i killed the process and bam, RAM usage magically went from over 60% down to like, 35%
it feels good to actually solve a computer problem once in a while