Virtual memory problem

Hi guys, im new here but hit a problem which has beaten me. Normanlly i can fix anything XP throws at me but this one has got me.

Ok i have a friends computer i am sat on currently. It keeps warning of low virtual memory. This surprises me as the computer is an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ and has an easy 512MB of RAM. We have tried whiacking the virtual memory up a bit but it is still filling up.

This lead me to investigate further. They use multiple user acounts and MSN premium which seems to load on all users simultaniously and uses up a fair bit of memory, but this is not concerning me as much as explorer.exe using up massive ammounts at the mo it is at: 121,000 K and as i type it is getting larger by the second. when i first logged on it was at 50,000 it doesnt seem to stop.

I have no idea what is causing this, I have closed down all background programs and disabled all from starting at startup from MSconfig. It is not spyware or virus as both scanners are perfectly up to date. He is using spybot which isnt my fav but it isnt picking up any of the normal culprits and this guy is fairly good at not going to dodgy sites.

So any ideas would be cool. It is a fairly clean install, he once set up a peer to peer netowork but nothing that would do this.

thanx for any help anyone can offer.

 

Hi notme and welcome.

I'm betting on a critter of some variety that is just being missed by the onboard AV and Spybot. Especially the spyware things are doing a better job of hiding themselves these days and I don't know of any single antispyware app that gets them all. The Microsoft antispyware utility (was Giant) is probably the best of them at this time though.

I'd say the first thing to do is verify that the version of explorer.exe that is running is the M$ version. Download a copy of Hijackthis v1.99.1 and do a scan. Not really looking for critters at this point (although probably it will show some) but to verify that c:\windows\explorer.exe (or whatever drive the OS runs from) is the running process. Then check properties on that file and make sure it is a Microsoft file and the version is what you expect.

Post back with that information and paste a copy of the HJT log file into a response here. If it looks viral/malware related we'll move the thread to the proper forum section.

Also a good idea to run an online virus scan since some critters disable the onboard AV but have it appear to still be functional. Several good links in my signature.

 

Hi, corrupt pagefile go to VM settings and set both max and min to 0,0 then reboot, windows will create a new pagefile. Go back to VM settings and reset pagefile Max and Min to your preffered settings.