Out of memory error Access 97/XP Home with > 512 megs of RAM

Access 97 is running on an XP Home machine pulling up a database on an
XP Pro machine. The XP Home machine has 512 megs of RAM, the XP Pro
machine has 768 megs. Access 97 runs fine on both machines. However,
when I recently tried to add another 256 megs of RAM to the XP Home
machine, I can't even load Access. I get an "out of memory" error,
"close unneeded programs and try again". The rest of my Office 97
apps work fine with the extra RAM, and I've tried about 4 different
sticks or RAM, switching slots, etc. As soon as I go back to 512
megs, it works fine again. I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling it
too. Meanwhile, the same app works fine on XP Pro with 768 megs of
RAM. I've also tried running it in '95 and '98 compatibility modes.
It doesn't seem to be a network thing because the out of memory errors
come up extremely fast, before it can start looking on the LAN for the
db.

I saw something about there being similar problems with Windows 98,
changing the VCACHE value to fix it, but not with XP Home. I
downloaded SR1 and some other updates for Office 97, but haven't
installed them yet as they were released before XP came out. Of
course the Win2k update might work fine on XP. But the XP Pro machine
is running Access 97 without any updates.

Richard Turner

re: Out of memory error Access 97/XP Home with > 512 megs of RAM

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:31:19 -0500, richard turner <rturner@ecg.com>
wrote:
[color=blue]
>Access 97 is running on an XP Home machine pulling up a database on an
>XP Pro machine. The XP Home machine has 512 megs of RAM, the XP Pro
>machine has 768 megs. Access 97 runs fine on both machines. However,
>when I recently tried to add another 256 megs of RAM to the XP Home
>machine, I can't even load Access. I get an "out of memory" error,
>"close unneeded programs and try again".[/color]
<snips>
Update. I found a similar situation at the MS KB. That one had
Access running into out of memory errors with 1 gb or more of RAM.
The solution was to update the Jet engine in Access 97.

However, before I could do that I had to update Office SR-1 and SR-2.
When I updated SR-1, during install it mentioned that every Office 97
app *except* Access was getting the upgrade. After that install,
Access opens but when I open a form I get different errors saying:

"MS Access can't load the 's' format." Okay.
"MS Access can't load the 'desc' format." Okay.
and two other similar errors. After that, I can move around the
database, make changes, etc. but I'm worried that doing that with the
errors will corrupt the database. It recommended I make registry
changes (but not which ones) or reinstall Access.

I reinstalled Access twice. I also did a system restore to get rid of
the SR-1 Office 97 update. That didn't work either. I tried
uninstalling MS Office after that, but couldn't. At this point, I'm
no longer using Access 97 on the XP Home computer. I'm starting to
think about formatting and reinstalling XP. Any advice? Thx.

Richard Turner