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Is this the holy grail to solving windows-out-of-resources bugs?

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mouser:
This was posted on Ed Bott's blog today, and it talks about Vista but i think this is applicable for Win2k and Windows XP as well.  I have run into this problem before and it's caused me no end of pain when it happens (sometimes you don't even realize this is the cause but strange things start happening to your computer like programs refuse to open).  I am going to try this right away and i'm excited about it.

After opening a large number of programs and windows, you try to launch a new program or open a new browser tab or even switch back to an already running program and instead:

* You get a strange “out of memory” message, despite the fact that you’re using only a fraction of the RAM installed on your system.
* The window opens but its contents refuse to load.
* The window opens, but menus are missing, dialog boxes are empty, or buttons don’t work. ...
The problem, as it turns out, is as old as the Windows NT family. I’ve found references to this issue that date back to the mid-1990s and Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5. The fix for Vista, just as for those much older versions of Windows, involves editing a key in the Windows Registry.

First the problem: Windows sets aside a blob of system memory called the desktop heap, which it uses to store user interface objects such as windows, menus, and hooks. The Microsoft Advanced Windows Debugging and Troubleshooting Blog offers a dense, but still readable explication of the problem and why it occurs (it’s a two-part series: read the Desktop Heap Overview first and if your eyes haven’t glazed over read the shorter Desktop Heap Part 2 for details that are specific to 64–bit Windows, systems with 3GB of RAM, and Windows Vista).

The fix for 32–bit Windows Vista is simple: The interactive desktop heap size needs to be bumped up to a value greater than its default setting of 3072KB.

--- End quote ---


http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=269

mwb1100:
Thanks for posting this - this happens to me every couple of weeks at work.  My fix so far has been to shutdown applications until things start working again.  Better than in the old Win9x days when this problem would likely render the machine unusable until you rebooted.

app103:
Oh, yes! Thank you! Is this the holy grail to solving windows-out-of-resources bugs?Is this the holy grail to solving windows-out-of-resources bugs?

I have been having a prob with this ever since I upgraded to IE 7. It has been driving me crazy.

It causes major probs with Paintshop Pro 7...not only will menus be missing, but it will change settings in the registry when you close and completely screw up things like the layers window, next time you run it. It happens frequently enough that I keep a .reg file handy to restore my settings.

mouser:
app this is only for winnt/2k/xp, wont work on win9x.

nudone:
dreamweaver will sometimes complain that i'm low on system memory - even though i'm obviously not. is this the sort of thing this solution will fix?

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