Nemo consuming all available (>80%) memory when file window opened

[Scott Atkinson]

Mint version 17.3.
For many weeks now, sometimes when Nemo opens a directory it begins to consume any and all available memory, up to the point where the whole system become unresponsive. I can sometimes ctrl-alt into a terminal after a few minutes (often taking several minutes to login there as well, sometimes not even being able to login before timeout, while sometimes I can't even do that and can only hard reboot, thus losing whatever I was working on) and kill the Nemo processes off. When I can do this (without having to reboot) Cinnamon then can take several minutes to restart and allow me to do anything on the desktop. When I specifically use Nautilus to open a folder window this problem doesn't happen, and directories generally load much much faster as well.
This is currently happening at least once per day, often more (since I then try to avoid opening anything that Nemo might be involved in afterwards). And while the most timely means to deal with it is to simply hard boot (2 mins vs up to 15 mins to attempt recovery) that's not ideal!