Apparently the SOE Launcher uses an HTML UI tool called Awesomium. I found it in my Task Manager when I was trying to find the source of "something" that had eaten all my RAM and dropped my performance in the toilet. Awesomium does not unload when the launcher exits and continues to run in the background. Maybe it is part of the background downloader?
After some googling I found that Awesomium has a known memory leak issue. I tried End Task on it but this did not free the RAM. I finally rebooted and that seems to have fixed it.
So, if you notice that your RAM gauge shows you are maxed out, this may be the issue. Of course, it could just be Windows. Everyone knows the only way to keep Windows performing consistently is too reboot regularly.