Memory Leak?

[Dan Royal]

I've got a Dell desktop running xp home edition with SP1. 2.2 ghz processor
with 256mb RAM. Every once in a while for no apparent reason it will slow
to a snails pace. Will take up to a full minute just to paint the main
windows screen and several minutes to load any programs. I can shut down
everything except my virus protection and it does no good until I reboot.
This seems to happen about once every 2 or 3 weeks. I defrag about once a
month. When it slows down like this it does it suddenly. One minute
everything is going fast, the next minute it's crawling.

I'm up to date on Norton anti virus using the live updates, and do a
complete system scan every week. I also do the complete system scan through
Norton System works every week, and that generally finds up to 5 or 6
registry problems and up to 20 short cut problems which it fixes.

Here's something that might be a clue. Whenever I reboot, I get a message
that says "Net.exe failed to initialize" before it shuts down.. When I
click "ok", it comes back again. This happens 6 times before the system
finally shuts down.

Any ideas?

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

Use task manager/processes to look at the running tasks. You can see which
one is constantly growing in memory size (indicates a leak).

 

[Gerry]

I had a similar problem on my Dell after I installed Norton System works. I
finally uninstalled NOS and the problem disappeared.

Use task manager/processes to look at the running tasks. You can see which
one is constantly growing in memory size (indicates a leak).