My friend had the same problem on her computer after I
installed it for her. she has windows XP pro w/ SP2 and
384MB of RAM. I don't know how much virtual memory since at
this time I am not able to check her computer.
Antispyware has a bug in its registry scan, it "leaks
memory" and uses all virtual memory if it hits a registry
key that has some type of permission problem.
I posted this in "Security at Home Discussion Group":
My home computer has 3 administrator accounts:
myself,wife,college son. Most of the mess gets on my
system when my son is at home. He downloaded Kazaa of
course and the infamous "AltNet" registry key was there.
Reading elsewhere about how to change the permissions I
ultimately got rid of it. However, in the process I
managed to change the permissions in such a way, that
running the Antispyware scan would hit this key and then
gobble up all virtual memory. Just letting you know.
Thanks--that's helpful. These lockups while scanning are pretty well
reported, so I expect Microsoft has a handle on this behavior. I haven't
actually run into any of the bugs that result in this behavior on the
machines I've cleaned so far.