The solution was to follow Macworlds article on disabling the Dashboard. That procedure involved opening the Terminal application and running the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Telling OSX you no longer wish to have Dashboard available. Since Dashboard is actually owned by the Dock you need to restart the Dock by again in Terminal typing:

killall Dock

After that, there should be no more Dashboard, or Dashboard tasks.

Given that I never ever run Dashboard, I thought I’d just check to see how much RAM Dashboard was actually gobbling up on my iMac, so I ran Activity Monitor to find out. Strangely there was nothing listed, even if I ran Dashboard itself, nothing showed up if I filter on Dash..

This got me thinking, and I came to the conclusion that Dashboard is actually part of the OS (or Dock) and it’s only the Widgets themselves that eat memory. I had months ago removed all the widgets from Dashboard (clicking the x to close them when Dashboard was up and running) effectively leaving Dashboard empty.

Adding a widget back in, resulted in the same behavior others had seen, a Dashclient application eating memory. Removing it, made all the Dashclient tasks vanish again.

So the bottom line is, simply opening dashboard and removing all widgets from the heads up display by use of the close button on the widgets, results in the same effect as detailed in the MacWorld article.