Because of the way Linux manages RAM using a task killer when you don't have any apps misbehaving will degrade your performance noticeably. This is because everything has to be loaded back into RAM when you start your application again. The "sleep" described above is negated when you kill all of your applications thinking that you will gain performance by "clearing" out RAM. So while in the WinMo world you wanted as few apps running as possible the same is not true in the Android world and your Hero is an Android device! It's not an easy mindset to change. I am a Linux geek for a living and I still grabbed a task manager on my first day and started killing running apps. I had to get my head around my phone actually being Linux. I can imagine for someone who doesn't come from my background that this is even harder to grok.