Very high ram usage for no apparent reason even when idle.

hey guys, ive been having this issue where even just right after i start up my pc, my ram usage is very high regardless of whats open. i have 32 gb of ram, and usually its like around 8 gb when idle, after a fresh boot of the pc (can go to 10-12 when playing games (not including the memory used by the game)).

what makes this complicated is that when checking task manager the ram usage by the processess it shows is not nearly as high, the highest memory using processes are very few and each use not a lot more than 200mb max. ive counted once and the processes memory usage from each one in the tab added up to around 2 gb (and it still showed 25% in use and 8 gb in the performance tab), so i have no idea whats going on..

also something that may be notable is i've had memory related issues (and a crash once) when playing modded minecraft (even though i shouldn't have as im allocating enough memory and everything)

-What I've Tried:

• full system scan with windows defender, with malwarebytes and with adwcleaner.

defender and mb both found nothing, adwcleaner found a few stuff but i removed them and that did not do anything.

• updating windows. did not help.
• booted up in safe mode, and one by one launched each program set to run at startup.
  even after i launched all of them, my memory usage was around 5-7% which is not nearly as high, so whatever causes this
• cleared the shell:startup folder. did not help.
• wrote a bat script to log ram usage each second and set it to run at startup.
  when windows started it, it was already detecting 20%, which then over 10 seconds ran up to 27 (which i think is just programs opening, unrelated).
• did a boot log with procmon. there were no processes that looked suspicious...
• turned the computer off and on again :)

so yeah i have *no* idea whats happening, but its causing problems and its very annoying. would love some help! thanks in advance :)