AARGHHH virtual memory

i've put threads up before about this but now it's beginning to really annoy me. i've tried every setting there is for this but when i've been playing a game, like medal of honor or unreal tournament 2003, when i go back to the desktop it takes ages to open a new window, IE6 or anything really. i've tried all sorts like setting the vm to 1.5 times the amount of ram i've got to even higher. i've even disabled it and all i keep getting is warnings saying windows xp is low on virtual memory. does anyone have any idea what could be causing it to slow down after exiting a game. i've got ram idle program installed. and my system specs are :-

amd athlon 1800xp
512mb ddr ram
geforce4 ti 4400 128mb
creative audigy

i have noticed that in the bios settings for the graphics card that video cache is disabled, would it help to enable it?

thanks in advance

Sounds like one of the apps on your machine has a memory leak. When this happens, it doesn't matter how large you set your pagefile, eventually it will fill up.

Bring up the task manager (Hold down CTRL/Shift & press Esc). Sort the processes by Memory by clicking on Mem Usage. This will show you which of your apps are hogging the memory.

Perhaps when you close a program, it is still running behind the scenes. Maybe the manufacturer has a patch for it.

yeah i've done that. probably the 3 main things that using the most memory are explorer.exe, IE6 and OE6 but the strange thing is that sometimes when i close outlook express i get some very strange error message saying that msimn.exe(followed by lot of weird numbers) could not be written to memory. this only happens on odd occasions though. i have other stuff running in the background like anti-virus software and my firewall which i need having an adsl connection i'm usually connected for 4-5 hours.

To see if your problem is related to your A/V software, try disabling the real time protection while you're playing those games.

If you think OE might be your culprit, you can trick your OS into thinking that OE is not installed my navigating to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed
Components\{44BBA840-CC51-11CF-AAFA-00AA00B6015C}. Change the value of IsInstalled to 0. This will allow you to reinstall OE......

i disable my AV and firewall software when playing games, so that it doesn't interfere with anything. i've got the exact error message i get off OE6 now.

msimn.exe application error
the instruction at "0x77f51f2c" reference memory at "0x009043b0" the memory could not be "Written" click ok to terminate program

it's a strange one!!
think i will visit MS site to see if there's anything on there