No programs open, but 3GB RAM in use?

I'm running into some problems with the amount of free RAM I have available to me, and it's causing serious performance problems.
I have a new 2011 MBP and I just ran into a situation where I ran out of RAM and the computer became extremely sluggish. I had 1 Safari window open and XCode open, editing a very small project. Between these two programs I was using about 600MB of my total 4GB of RAM. Even though I was only using 600MB of RAM on actual programs, Activity Monitor reported I was out of Memory, and did not say that any programs were using all my memory, only that it was gone.
I decided to quit all open programs, but the problem did not go away. Sitting there with no open programs, my computer was using 3GB of its total 4GB of RAM in either wired or active state, and another 750MB in inactive state. I seem to be entirely unable to reclaim that 750MB even when using the "purge" command in Terminal. Activity monitor claims that kernel_task is using 300MB right now, but doesn't list any other programs using significant amounts of memory, yet I only have 400MB of my 4GB available as "free" memory.
If this were only a reporting error from Activity Monitor, and the RAM really was free and it was just reported incorrectly, then that would be fine. But the computer behaves as if it's constantly out of memory. Also, rebooting isn't a great solution because this happens to me all the time, even after reboots. It only solves the problem for a few minutes.
Any suggestions? Does this happen to anyone else? I didn't notice this behavior on my old 2007 MBP (also with 4GB RAM).

About OS X Memory Management and Usage
Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Memory Management in Mac OS X
Performance Guidelines- Memory Management in Mac OS X
A detailed look at memory usage in OS X
Understanding top output in the Terminal
The amount of available RAM for applications is the sum of Free RAM and Inactive RAM. This will change as applications are opened and closed or change from active to inactive status. The Swap figure represents an estimate of the total amount of swap space required for VM if used, but does not necessarily indicate the actual size of the existing swap file. If you are really in need of more RAM that would be indicated by how frequently the system uses VM. If you open the Terminal and run the top command at the prompt you will find information reported on Pageins () and Pageouts (). Pageouts () is the important figure. If the value in the parentheses is 0 (zero) then OS X is not making instantaneous use of VM which means you have adequate physical RAM for the system with the applications you have loaded. If the figure in parentheses is running positive and your hard drive is constantly being used (thrashing) then you need more physical RAM.
Adding RAM only makes it possible to run more programs concurrently. It doesn't speed up the computer nor make games run faster. What it can do is prevent the system from having to use disk-based VM when it runs out of RAM because you are trying to run too many applications concurrently or using applications that are extremely RAM dependent. It will improve the performance of applications that run mostly in RAM or when loading programs.

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