OK so here's what I did... (I'm not very knowledgeable of computers in general, so bear with me if my language isn't correct):
- While MB was having memory leak, went to task manager and ended MB process... it re-launched itself a couple times but stopped trying to launch after I disabled web protection (which had been turning itself off and on repeatedly) and ended MB task a few more times
- Rebooted pc, disabled MB while it was starting itself up, went online to investigate
- Was directed to this forum post so I followed the instructions... ensured web protection was still turned off, updated MB, rebooted pc, re-launched MB and turned real time web protection back on. As of this morning (~8:50am PST) MB has been running at normal memory usage (around 255mb as of writing this, compared to 12K+ which crashed my computer earlier) and I've run a couple full scans to test it out. Everything appears normal so far, to the best of my understanding:
To answer your other question, I'm afraid I can't provide much input there. I'm pretty certain that I'm real and in human form, but metaphysics goes way over my head.