First post, by Kahenraz
- Rank
- l33t
I've been running into this error a lot as I try to incorporate a workflow in Windows 98 that includes Cygwin, for the familiar Bash shell and utilities. I wasn't entirely convinced that Cygwin was the cause but rather a trigger, and have been investigating this for time. I tried various methods of causing memory pressure and different ideas to simulate how Cygwin behaves, and finally found that it seemed to be connected somehow to spawning lots of short lived child processes. This unstable state can be induced by opening and closing Notepad (or some other program) repeatedly until it fails to open. At this point, the system should be unable to open a DOS command window. Win32 applications will typically still work, but there is a chance that the entire system will lock up.
All of the references I've found regarding this error always seem to point to the vcache or having too much memory installed. While this error may also be induced in these other scenarios as well, and the error message itself may be the same, I'm not confident that the problem is identical. I've tried all kinds of different configurations of real hardware, VMs, updates, and patches, but I haven't found anything to mitigate this problem, or even what causes it. It's a disease that can only be solved by a system reboot. Whatever "memory" Windows thinks has run out of, seems like it can never be reclaimed.
Does anyone have any information on this, what may be causing it, how to avoid it, and how to recover from this state?
Lots of information here:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/183777-how-to-de … n-windows-9xme/
I also made a video of the problem in action:
https://youtu.be/ssDf-fF6ULY