This one is sadly, most often due to virus or other "malware." If you are lucky, a virus scanner may find it and with the NAME of the bug, a cure can be found. Otherwise you get to save your files somewhere and get ready to reinstall or repair the OS.
Bob
Windows 2000
Maxtor 80 GB C: Drive
392 MB of memory
Whenever I try to open certain programs (Windows Media Player, Real Player, Winamp, AIM) it opens in MS-DOS with the message "Program too big to fit memory" then closes. When I check my CPU and MEM usage, everything is fine, hardly goes above 3%. There aren't any processes open that use more than 6 MB of memory (except IEXPLORE.EXE that uses 19 MB), and I've tried closing all nonessential processes just to be safe, but it didn't change anything. Other programs like Adobe Photoshop work at normal speed as usual. I haven't changed any system preferences, but I may have downloaded a virus from a P2P sharing program.
Side-note: Whenever I shut down or restart my computer, explorer.exe doesn't respond and I have to force quit it. But I've had that problem for a while, it's just one of the many small glitches my computer has developed. Just thought that information might mean something...

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