Memory Leak: Insufficient System Resources

My practice is to turn off the machine at bedtime and reboot it every morning, so that it gets a fresh start every day. I upgraded to Windows-7 from -XP about a month ago, applied all available updates and thought it the right move until recently. Now after the machine runs several hours, when I try to invoke another program, I get, usually with reference to the invoking filename from Windows Explorer,

"Insufficient System Resources exist to complete the requested service"

It does allow the Windows Task Manager to start, after several seconds of black screen, where I see three things of interest:
1. Display resolution shrinks to 640x480
2. Memory utilization is above 3.9 GB (out of 4)
3. The program, iexplore.exe, keeps thrashing in and out every few seconds.

Another item of interest that begins shortly after system boot is the cursor on the display. Instead of the normal arrowhead pointing up at an angle of about 110 degrees, I see the arrowhead plus an hour-glass just beside it. The hour-glass is blinking on and off at a rate of several times per second. This behavior is more or less continual. When the hour-glass goes away, the next invocation gets the insufficient resource message.

Gentlemen, this is clearly what, thirty years ago on UNIX, we used to call a "memory leak" -- in this case, as atrocious as any I ever saw. Rebooting the machine, starting only the Windows Task Manager and watching the memory utilization, I see it rising at an estimated rate of a quarter gigabyte per minute -- with nothing else running!

Looking at how long this problem has been outstanding in this forum and the many times and many systems for which it has been reported without resolution, I abandon hope of a fix. Two things are clear:
1. Memory leaks are without question deficiencies in the OS, so it's a Microsoft software problem
2. Instead of fixing it, Microsoft wants you to buy Windows-8 -- as if that's any encouragement!

XP has its problems but at least it will run all day without rebooting. My recourse is obvious.
Thank you for your attention.

--rlsj

I've been using Windows 7 for several years and have never seen any evidence that the os has a memory leak. I have had some apps that had one, but not Windows itself.

I should also mention that I only boot my laptop once a week because of forced updates from my employer that require a reboot, and my desktop at home often runs for months at a time.

Barnabas1969, I can see how you reach your conclusion. But an application running out of memory: i.e., trying to reach memory out of the address range, is a different problem and would not prevent the OS from starting other programs.

As to your second post, congratulations on your good luck!

--rlsj

When an application has a memory leak, it will fill all available memory. At some point, it will be impossible to start other apps. Eventually, the offending application will hang/crash.

barnabas1969 wrote:
"When an application has a memory leak, it will fill all available memory..."

Whatever RAM is available, yes, then the OS assigns virtual memory -- swapping from real RAM into and out of disk, what Microsoft calls its "Page file" -- up to the limits of the addressing scheme, which in a 32-bit system like mine is 4 GB. At the end of the address range the application fails, the OS unassigns all its memory, terminates it and lets other programs run. I refer to a properly coded OS of course.

Please recall my reported observation of the steady rise in memory utilization even with no application invoked since reboot except the Windows Task Manager. This cannot be an application failure.

This is a Microsoft bug in Windows-7, probably in the system task controller, which in most systems is responsible for memory clean-up.

--rlsj

rlsj said:

barnabas1969 wrote:
"When an application has a memory leak, it will fill all available memory..."

Whatever RAM is available, yes, then the OS assigns virtual memory -- swapping from real RAM into and out of disk, what Microsoft calls its "Page file" -- up to the limits of the addressing scheme, which in a 32-bit system like mine is 4 GB. At the end of the address range the application fails, the OS unassigns all its memory, terminates it and lets other programs run. I refer to a properly coded OS of course.

Please recall my reported observation of the steady rise in memory utilization even with no application invoked since reboot except the Windows Task Manager. This cannot be an application failure.

This is a Microsoft bug in Windows-7, probably in the system task controller, which in most systems is responsible for memory clean-up.

--rlsj

Yep, you're correct... it will fill up the page file too... and at that point, you won't be able to start a new app. You're point?

Sigh. The page file -- Virtual Memory -- on my system is over 12 GB. No single application could fill that up, because no application can access more than the logical maximum memory address, which on a 32-bit system is 4 GB (the hardware address registers are 32 bits wide; 2^32=4G). The OS can, in effect, because it maintains a complex table of correspondence between page file disk chunks and the address chunks in separate applications. Besides, no application that I've installed could use anywhere near 4 GB, and none of them is new since Windows-XP, which had no memory leak.

As to your good fortune without resource errors in Windows-7, you obviously have different hardware-software combinations than I. Program bugs appear only for certain sequences of events, which depend on those differences.

As to DSprague's recommendation of a clean install, this began as a clean install, followed by application of all updates, followed by installing the same applications from -XP. With no other difference, how could a new OS install be effective?

Thank you, but I know how to recover from this debacle.

--rlsj