Not enough system resources in XP?

[elkinm]

For some time now, my system starts to act really strange every week or two. It gets to a point that I cannot launch any window without some corruption. Meaning the window is either messed up or not displayed at all, even the task manager shows up as blank. And if I try to load system properties or display properties I get a shell.dll error or some other errors depending on what I am doing.

If I have some open programs, regardless of weather there are few or many, if I close some I can view everything again for a short time. But eventually everything becomes messed up again.

This is on a new C2D system which although not completely new, is still quite clean with very little on it.

This problem also occurred on my old system shortly before I upgraded.

One possible cause is uTorrent which has an Insufficient System Resources error, but if I close uTorrent the problem does not go away for the rest of the system.

I am also using AVS as I did on my previous system, so could AVS be causing some problem, maybe in conjunction with uTorrent?

I task manger shows 1.5+ GB of free ram and no program has high memory or CPU usage or high handle count. I also tried process explorer, without any new information.

If I restart the PC, and only if I restart it it goes back to normal for a while, but I hate restarting and would like to know what is happening.

Thanks

 

[Markbnj]

What version of the operating system?

 

[elkinm]

XP Pro SP2, and I have all the windows updates, in case anybody is wondering.

 

[elkinm]

Interesting stuff is happening. I have no access to any of the system tools or pretty much anything. A while ago I could not even play a video. Now I can in some limited capacity.

I also hear a beep once in a while form the PC speaker. I have an ASUS P5B Deluxe, my temps and volts are normal from PC probe, to the extent that it actually worked.

I am keeping the system as is in case somebody find a way to fix it or at least has an idea on how to find out what is wrong?

Thanks

 

[corkyg]

Sounds like an excessive dose of malware.

 

[Markbnj]

Originally posted by: elkinm
Interesting stuff is happening. I have no access to any of the system tools or pretty much anything. A while ago I could not even play a video. Now I can in some limited capacity.

I also hear a beep once in a while form the PC speaker. I have an ASUS P5B Deluxe, my temps and volts are normal from PC probe, to the extent that it actually worked.

I am keeping the system as is in case somebody find a way to fix it or at least has an idea on how to find out what is wrong?

Thanks

Too many different symptoms to see a pattern. If it were me I would think about a reinstall of the OS to see if the problem recurs. It it does might be time to take a close look at all the hardware and drivers.

 

[xtknight]

You could be running out of memory. How much physical RAM do you have? Increase the size of your page file and see how it goes. It's also vaguely possible that some of your RAM is bad, I recommend memtest86. Different programs handle "being out of virtual memory" (RAM+page file) in different ways. IE just stops drawing the window and leaves the toolbars in weird configurations, I've experienced this a couple times when I've gone over about 50 IE windows.

What is AVS?

 

[corkyg]

The only AVS i know is this, and it doesn't fit:

AVS

 

[elkinm]

The system is a relatively clean install of XP. This is my new C2D system. It is not clean in the sense that it has nothing but AVS (Active Virus Shield), uTorrent, some games like half-life 2 and not much else.

I have 2GB of ram and over 1.5 shows up as free.

Mem test is clean and my pagefile is large, but I will try making it bigger, but by all indication pagefile usage is minimal.

I have seen the IE problems with to many windows, especially with the Google toolbar, but this is different in the sense that it just gets worse.

This was happening on my old system and they only had uTorrent and AVS in common.

And on the current system this started almost immediately. I don't know if there is some problem with uTorrent, but I think it may be more of a uTorrent and AVS compatibility problem?

The strange thing is that shutting down uTorrent or AVS does not fix the problems and soon the system will run out of resources.

I have thought about trying the Kaspersky trial or another virus scanner to see if it helps, as I don't think this happened with Kaspersky which is strange.

But no mater what I do, I just want some way to find out what is happening and have my system run normally without a restart.

Thanks again.

 

[sandeman59]

I had a similar problem using uTorrent. I think you should try throttling back on your uTorrent download rate, you may have more success.

 

[lxskllr]

Maybe your HD is going bad.