One of my service drives has 10.7.4 on it and it only has about 4gb of free space on it. It doesn't need much, and this drive has 14 partitions on it so I can't be too generous.

Anyway, when I boot off that one and open terminal, it instantly pops up that "terminal has detected it is running low on swap space" message. I ok it. And within seconds, it pops up again. This repeats until I quit terminal. If I move the window out of the way without closing it, it auto-closes about 15 sec later, causing it to pop up again. Thankfully it stays down in the same place instead of going back to the middle of the screen, and doesn't yoink itself frontmost. So I can actually use terminal, but y'know, it's annoying!

It also bonks at me with a system beep each time it re-opens the window.

I don't see a way to disable this "helpful feature"?

Rooting around on Apple's site suggests that there can be an interaction between terminal and mdworker on systems with low free space that will cause spurious "terminal has detected that you are low on swap space" messages. I'd try disabling Spotlight indexing just to see if that makes a difference.

Since mdworker loves to pounce on hard drives I attach for data recovery, (something which a LOT of them really don't appreciate) I have removed the offending plist from launchagents. So no mdworker here.

In that case, I got nuthin'. Seems to me that Terminal's memory footprint ought to be pretty light, you know?