Many thanks for your suggestion. If nothing else, I learned of a great utility today by running WinDirStat.
I ran the utility and did not see any mysteriously large files – anything above 1GB or so was known and accounted for (Steam games and media)… My pagefile size is 12.9 GB. I have no idea whether this is ‘typical’ or not. I have never tampered with my virtual memory settings and have always left that business to Windows. I should also note that I have rebooted several times. Additionally, I reinstalled GIMP, ran the app briefly, and then uninstalled it again.
Hmmm.
quick edit: to reiterate, my system has 12GB of RAM. I tried to google a ‘typical’ or normal pagefile size for these specs with Win11, but I did not find a clear answer.