Dunno, could be normal behavior. Don't have the game so can't check for myself.

Try loading the game in NTVDM in XP and/or normal MS-DOS and see if it performs the same behavior.

Some DOS games\programs aren't very good at removing themselves from memory. This is why each game you want to play in DosBox should be launched in seperate DosBox's.

are you certain that exited volkov commander ? not that exited to the shell. (shelled ? not sure what the correct term would be)

They have a memory block with a psp-reference to e000
(ems pageframe), don't know why yet, happens only when
ems is enabled.
Dosbox only removes memory blocks that the program owns,
so this block remains allocated.

The value e000 should be overwritten when the memory
block is resized, quite odd behaviour of msdos.