My system has been working great for months...until now. I have all my collegec++ assignments on it..My ram slowly is eaten away until there is about 1-3 megs left. I JUST reinstalled WinXP for the THIRD time this week to try and fix this - it's absolute hell. I am running a system managed pagefile on D:\ where my Windows dir is. It's about 70% full, and a second 100Gb hdd about 80% full. Both are FAT32 and defragged. The D hdd was just formatted with a clean XP install about 2 weeks ago and HAS been running good. Could a virus or worm be doing this to my RAM? The Ram itself is less than a month old. my bios is set to default all with hyper threading enabled(this has been constant) In Task Manager it says I'm using on average 100-140 megs of swapfile. This has been the same since install, and cpu usage is 0-5% , also average. There are some other weird things which I don't know if are related: when I try to run Norton AntiVirus 2004 LiveUpdate, i get this error: "LU1815: LiveUpdate could not access a file please make sure you have some free disk space on the drive you installed windows." Buy the way, all i have running in windows is taskman systray and Norton AV.. Please offer any suggestions - im really desperate here..thanks

Another note: When i boot into safe mode, my ram is fine and does not disappear. any suggestion??

If it does not do that in safemode then it is a software issue.. Try this Scan! first. I would also recommend downloading and installing your windows critical updates and your display driver too. Goodluck