Recently I have found an odd memory problem in Windows XP. Several day's ago whenever I checked the usage in task manager it would show as around 190mb, increasing when opening programs and shrinking back when they were closed. I was going through some XP tweak sites to try and improve the preformance and ended up changing several registry keys. Most of the key's I can remember but there are a few which I cannot. Somewhere within these changes I believe is my problem as Windows now shows a usage of between 550mb and 700mb just at startup. It is almost as if every program and device windows uses was loaded into memory something like old DOS used to do if the high memory wasn't eneabled. Each program now seems to use more than 10 times the amount of memory they used to and I have searched over everything I can think of. Would anyone have some suggestions for this problem or know of links to or anyone who has experienced this before. Any help would be greatly appeciated.

first, restore your registry from a backup (if you didn't make one SHAME ON YOU. but i'm sure you'll be able to pull the backup off your recovery disk. just note that you'll need to re-install all your programs again.

next, open msconfig (start: run : 'msconfig') and look in startup. see what's opening up when you start your computer. there might be some double instances in there, trying to make programs open twice. If not, look and try and trim things that you never use off. don't, as a rule uncheck things that you 1. don't know what they do, or 2. are registered with microsoft.

See if there is something in your startup ... make sure there's nothing starting with your windows startup ... from msconfig ... and then tell us the results.

Check for viruses and trojans while you're at it...

Thanks for the info but I have tried all of that already. Nothing in the startup has changed, the same programs are still opeining as they were and I only have a total of 25 loaded at startup. As we speak my task manager list shows Firefox using 106,268k, explorer.exe using 52,260k, 4 instances of svchost.exe ranging from 4708k to 45,244k, even winlogon.exe is using 27,020k. My total usage sits at 612mb and this bothers me. Might there be a good scanner or program to view where and how much memory these programs are using, and why they are using so much of it ?

I know this sounds drastic, but have you considered a format/reinstall of windows?

I agree with Goldeneagle2005. Whilst you can continually tweek settings back into place, it will be hard to get the original configuration back.

At least you have access to back up any data before hand, and if you want to be safe, you can ghost image from Nortons Ghost (about £35 ~ $50).

This issue has to be our #1

You have 2 possibles! :evil:

Corupted Icon or program in systems tray!

Double download of an application possible antivirus they drill into registry

and will destroy memory!

Take a peek at my video how to make your computer faster .com this will put you on the right path :lol:

Hey guy's, I had to go away for awhile but thanks for all the input. Just in case anyone else has a problem like this, the first thing you should do is check the memory chips. Bad memory will make this and many other problems. If a system was working good one day and then badly the next---never suspect software---only hardware.

Yeah.. :eek: a gud point to note, format and reinstall are not the only solutions