Thanks Walo! You are spot on! I just got my flu ridden carcass out of bed and made a few calls. As to the forum here (where there's MB staff & other techs much brighter than me), I'll just repeat (for whatever it’s worth) the low tech steps (in my particular case) that allowed me to get the MB fix loaded and out of the woods (without uninstalling/reinstalling MB). “ I booted Windows in “Safe Mode” (tapping F8 while booting), pulled up “Services”, set the MB service (there’s just 1) from Automatic to Manual, then hit the stop button (on the same MB service screen) & then rebooted again in normal mode. When Windows came back up, the memory usage had dropped back to normal (because MB didn’t try to auto load on boot) and I was then able to update MB with the fix. The memory leak did not cause any damage or corruption on my workstation, rather it just froze a number of processes consistently and kept me from loading the fix to stop the leak. I haven't read all the 25 pages that have accrued since I posted this earlier today. So, there's probably plenty of more useful info in there than what I have posted here. But thought I'd throw it out again. Good luck to everyone still weathering this storm (both MB users & MB alike).
One other comment I always make to myself during situations like this (again for whatever it's worth) is to “document all the steps I’ve tried thus far” (before those steps become a tower of babble in my own head and I can’t remember everything I’ve tried and in what order). Sometimes that info helps me know if there’s anything I need to set back to default (because it didn’t solve the problem anyways) or is useful when seeking advice from techs who know the particular issues in detail. It sometimes gives me an exit out of a wrong rabbit hole I went down and I've been down plenty of them.