what happens when Windows runs out of memory

[think2]

Using Windows 7. We have a Delphi program which, after a couple weeks, the whole PC crashes or the program crashes or something or other. The program is driving the sounder a lot and there appears to be a memory leak/ handle leak in the Windows sounder driver as described here
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981013
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2670667

When Windows runs out of memory due to the memory leak, will it die gracefully or will software execute badly so that just about anything can happen? Should there be an indication in the event viewer or windows dump file or something that the system ran out of memory or handles?

TIA

 

[BrightCandle]

Initially the machine will slow down as the PC uses the hard drive swap file AW memory. Then once the process fills ram any programs requesting memory may fail to get it. Depending on how those programs are written the programs might crash with an exception and the ram be reclaimed or they might carry on trying, maybe in a tight loop that could make the machine lookup. One of those programs is yours but other software will be requesting RAM and that may also fail potentially leaving the operating system without key services.

The result therefore ranges from the memory hog programming crashing to the OS locking up completely. Without ram you may find the event log and dump file can't be written so you won't necessarily get a log of it happening.