out of memory

[jorgito boucas]

athlon xp 2400 + 512 mb ram with win xp.
This machine is always turned on, night and day.
avg anti virus runs every 2 of the morning
webshots screen saver running
monitor is set to turn off 1 our without work
hard disks goes off 2 ours without work
anti spyware scheduled to run at 4 of the morning.
At morning the machine shows a out of memory message and
after prees the ok button every thing goes extremly slow
and reboot is needed to get things normal again.
So, I did the sad uninstall of the anti spyware.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

This is one possibility for what happened:

Certain malware changes permissions on registry keys such that the current
user, even if they are administrator, don't have permission to work with the
contents of that registry key.

Microsoft Antispyware presently doesn't handle this well, appears to hang,
and also apparently leaks memory.

so--your description makes me think that you probably have such a threat in
place and should take some effort to remove it.

I'd suggest an online scan of your machine using Trend Micro's online virus
scanner. Trend Micro now also targets spyware and the online scanner both
detects and removes:

http://houscall.trendmicro.com