Never been too keen on Steam and still not bought anything on it, but had to install it the other day to install Empire:Total War

Just checked the Task Manager and Steam is running in the background (not played Empire or done anything with Steam since PC was last started) ... using over 40MB of RAM. More than Excel, Skype, any individual Windows processes or anything in fact that I'm actually using besides Firefox.

What the heck is it doing that takes so much resources while its not even being used? I'm rather concerned that its taking any besides a bare few for the icon to be in the corner doing nothing.