Please help if you can, as I'm in my last few months of a 3 year university course, and this problem is affecting my ability to produce documents. Thanks!! I have many jpegs in my directory, arranged in folders, sub-folders, etc. Some are jpegs off the internet, while many are from my Fuji Finepix digital camera. There are some picture formats (bitmaps, photoshop docs, etc) in there too, but the vast majority are jpegs, around 400KB each in size. During the last 2-3 weeks, whenever I try to open folders that contain jpegs, the folder freezes while trying to display the thumbnails/lists, and the directory just closes. Sometimes a message comes up that ends in 'memory could not be read', or 'memory could not be written'. Sometimes it freezes so badly that I have to reboot. Either way, Windows won't let me open the folders containing the jpegs. A similar problem happens when I try to import the jpegs from inside a program, such as Microsoft Word. When I go to Import Picture>From File, and then open a folder that contains jpegs, the program closes in an instant. This is incredibly frsutrating as it's preventing me from working. The problem never occured until recently. Windows has suddenly developed a problem viewing/importing/handling jpegs, and possibly other picture formats. I'm using Windows XP Pro, and have a good PC, still with 50GB free HDD space, and 1MB RAM. PC is working very well apart from this. Any suggestions or help would be VERY gratefully reeived. Thanks!! Chris.

Need more memory. Increase Pagefile.sys and see if that works. Right click My computer Advance Tab, Performance Settings Advance Tab, Increase Virutal memory. Typically should be 3 times the size of your ram. mike

Good Recs from Mike! Also just for our knowledge can you post how much memory you have installed and also the size of your Page File? Additionally you can try turning thumbnails off so that it doesn't preview every jpg/file in the directory. Also I would be interested in knowing which application you have registered to handle jpegs. I have noticed some photo products as being very memory intensive (Corel and Adobe) and maybe these are the apps that are being called to "preview" the thumbnails as well. If this is the case then this could be the cause of your memory issues. I would maybe try having jpegs/gifs/Tiffs default to MS Preview for Windows and then opening the images in an alternate program when needed. Hope that helps! Michael Live, Love & Google!

Many thanks for your suggestions Mike, which I carried out. I incresed the virtual memory to 3000MB, 3 times larger than my 1GB memmory as you suggested (1000MB is equivalent to 1GB isn't it???). Unfortunately it hasn't solved the problem. Is there anything else you might suggest? Thanks also for you reply Michael. I have 1GB of memory installed, which I need for video editing. I've had this installed for a year or two, but this jpeg problem has only just started. Having said that, this is the first time I've had a large-ish collection (150 MB or so) of jpegs taken from a digital camera on my HDD. The folders and sub-folders in which they're stored is mirrored on my back-up external HDD, which is 250GB. The same problem happens when accessing the jpegs on the exteranl HDD, and also when importing from it from inside Word. Sorry, but I'm not sure what you mean by the size of the 'page file'. Could you briefly explain this? Thanks. I just use Windows Picture And Fax Viewer to view jpegs. Is this what you mean by 'handle' them? If not, then I didn't know you could assign a certain program to generate the previews. I assumed Windows just did this.

In my original post, I did of course mean I have 1GB of RAM !!!! (not 1MB)

> "...I incresed the virtual memory to 3000MB..." > "... I'm not sure what you mean by the size of the 'page file'..." These two are the same thing... it's called "Virtual Memory" but the "page file" is the physical file location of the memory. You already took care of this when you increased to 30000MB (which is not quite 3 Gigs btw. 3 x 1024 = 3 Gigs, but close enough :-) Yes, you also answered my "handling" question. If neither of these helped cure the issue then I might start scanning your computer to see if any virus has infected (or is starting to infect) all of your jpeg files. Update all your virus defs and go run some scans. Post back the results! Thanks. Michael Live, Love & Google!

Thanks for replying again Michael, really appreciate your time. Okay, I've just ran a 'full system scan' with Spyware Doctor, which takes about 15 minutes to complete. It revealed 25 infections. 10 were advertising cookies, 12 were tracking cookies, 2 were cookies to do with WinFixer2005 (a registry cleaner), and 1 was from 'secondthought.com', which was a a 'commercial trojan'. Spyware Doctor removed all the infections. I then ran adaware, which just found one tracking cookie. It removed it. I then ran Spyware Snooper, which found 4 tracking cookies and 4 ads. It removed them all. I then did a virus scan with Zone Alarm, which didn't find anything. Not surprising seeing as it was the 4th program to do a scan! The problem is still there. This is interesting....just as an experiment, I moved the location of the master folder containing all the folders and sub-folders that contain the jpegs. For an hour or so, all was fine...I could explore the folders, view thumbnails, etc, and I could even import jpegs into Word as normal. Then, all of a sudden, the problem started again!! Aarrggh!!