Windows Vista Extreme memory leak with no traces?

When I say extreme, I mean EXTREME.

First, here are the related system specs:
- Laptop (Acer Aspire 5920G)
- Windows Vista Premium SP1
- Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 Ghz
- 2 GB DDR2 RAM

Here goes. When I start in normal mode (not any of the safe modes), the
memory starts out at around 1300 MB free. However, in the span of around 3 to 4 minutes, the available memory just starts to dwindle to 100 MB free, and when it gets even less, the system hangs. I've tried opening the task manager and seeing which processes eat up the said gigantic memory, and apparently none was. The highest eater was my running Bitcomet which took up around 50MB, and the rest are just 10 and below.

This has never happened to me before, and just started occurring a few days
ago, when I suddenly started getting Windows dialog boxes when running a game saying that I was low on memory and I could choose the option of clicking "close program" to shut the game down (or cancel the box). At first I thought it was just a new feature implemented by SP1 since I never got that box even when running demanding games last year, but then I think about when I just freshly installed SP1 and how it also didn't show up when I ran the said demanding games.

I've tried killing everything in my system tray, and every program that is
running on the taskbar, but the memory decline still continues on. And that's
why right now, I am running (and posting this) on safe mode with networking and everything is A-OK memory-wise. The memory usage as of writing is comparable to my regular usage back when there was no memory leak, the absence of various startup programs' usage of memory considered, of course. So I guess it's not the basic Windows stuff that's causing this.

I have also tried running a virus scan on the critical areas of the computer
like the Windows and its system32 folder, the startup programs, the registry, and the memory (I use Kaspersky, fully updated) but it shows no infections. I also tried AVG, but the result is still nil. I am currently attempting a computer-wide scan, and if that still fails, I might even have to try ending processes (even though they show no sign of eating that 1GB+ of memory...) and services one at a time to see what's wrong. This is driving me crazy.

Is anyone familiar with this issue? Any leads or help is greatly appreciated! Many thanks in advance.

-Kaien

 

Check the settings for Virtual Memory (Paging File), have you (or maybe somebody else) turned it off? Check it is set to Automatic.

At the Start Search box, type in msconfig and run it. Under the startup tab should be all the startup items, you could try disabling them one by one. In Help and Support read about "selective startup" and try those options to identify the cause.

Matt