Then Windows crashed (blue screen) with and error at 0028:FF009611 (if I read my notes right); insufficient resources.

Ah, this is interesting.

In Windows, most people mistake the word "Resources" to mean "Disk Space and/or RAM". That's not always the case.

In Windows, the term "Free System Resources" refers to the amount of free heap space in (if I remember correctly) USER.EXE and GDI.EXE. Certain windows functions would store pointers in this space. If you ran out of space here (which wasn't much, only 256k or so if I recall), then software would start to crash left and right because all its USER and GDI function calls would start erroring out.

Under Windows 3.1, this used to be a really big problem-- it would run out of FSR's (as we called them) quite frequently. Any program that did GDI calls (such as creating a font or a brush to draw on the screen) could theoretically eat resources if it didn't close out that GDI handle properly. We used to use a "resource meter" utility to monitor our app's usage of FSR's and locate leaks.

In Win 95 and beyond, supposedly they altered the way Windows allocates these resources and I thought they had solved the problem. Although perhaps not. I haven't had to deal with this issue in a long time, so I don't know if it's changed.

Empeg guys: Any thoughts on this?





-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.