Thread creation error in Vista

Hi! My mom is staying with my brother, and I'm trying to help her fix my brother's computer long-distance. We went through the malware removal, but she's still having a problem.

Sometimes this error will appear:
Thread creation error: not enough storage is available to process this command.

I had her go to System Information. Here is the memory information at that time:
Total physical memory: 1013.43 MB
Available physical memory: 326.81 MB
Total virtual memory: 2.41 GB
Available virtual memory: 1.04 GB
Page file size: 1.48 GB

I know that sometimes it happens when the computer has been in another user account, then logged off and logged into my brother's account. SigmaTel comes up, and then the error. But she said sometimes it comes up when she turns on the magnifier.

I'm really not sure what all to tell you or what to look at or try... I haven't seen this one before, and most of the info online seems to concentrate on settings in particular programs that cause the error. That isn't the issue here, or it doesn't appear to be.

Thank you in advance for any help you can give me!

 

You don't say which OS you are using but this is a very small amount of available memory. I see you have 1 GB installed (which is ok for most OS's) but you've only about a 1/3 of it available. I would go through the PC and uninstall any unused/unwanted programs/files/videos, etc. Let us know if that helps any because there is an awful lot of space being used.

 

Hi, Dyamond! Thank you for your quick response!

I did put Vista in the title, but I should have put it into the actual post. Sorry about that.

We have gone through and uninstalled all kinds of stuff that was unnecessary. I haven't had her go through the services, though. This computer hasn't had this error before, so I know something isn't right. We'll go through the services and report back. I had forgotten to do that.

Thanks for jogging my memory!

 

Doh.. you did say Vista.. sorry :-o

If you've already cleaned out old unused files, then what on earth is taking up over a half gig of space?

 

It's okay!

How familiar with Vista are you? I'm just asking because my uncle has a Vista laptop, and it has 1.5 GB memory. When you just turn the thing on, it appears that Vista all by its lonesome self is taking up over 750 MB of it. It doesn't have anything else running. I've been through the services and all. I don't even have security on the thing unless I'm going to take it online for updates. I then promptly uninstall the security so it doesn't take up valuable memory that he needs for PowerPoint.

I did a quick search online, and it does seem that Vista can take up 700+ MB RAM just to turn it on. Yuk! But I did find an interesting article that attempts to explain that it isn't all Vista... that Vista is holding stuff it thinks you will be needing in RAM... it claims that XP wastes memory by not stuffing it with things for you to use. The article is here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/why-does-vista-use-all-my-memory.html

I'm unconvinced. If this were a good thing, then Vista shouldn't be so sluggish so often.

At any rate, it looks like Vista itself is probably what's taking up over half a gig. I love Windows 7!

We will still go through the services, but we've done that once before, about a year ago, so it probably won't change much. I'm sure he could use more RAM, but still... this computer wasn't getting this error until sometime in the last year.