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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