Any EXPERTS?

[Groundbound1]

Here's one for ya! First the specs, so you can get a clearer picture of the situation.

The board: MSI K7T Turbo (no RAID)

The CPU: AMD Athlon 1800+ @ 1.5Ghz (I DO not, and WILL not O/C)

The Memory: (CL3) PC-133, three 256MB modules, three different brands, but all three have the same timings. (yes, I'm sure)

The Video: ATI Radeon 9600XT (made by Visiontek) with 256MB ram (@ 4X agp)

The OS: Windows 98SE

The Problem: I have just RECENTLY started having the dreaded " out of available system memory" error (dreaded by Win 98 users that is) pop up on me while loading FS9, after having NO trouble for more than a year with the same rig.

Here's what happened:

I've read all the articles I could find by MS and others about how Windows 9x might have trouble on systems with more than 512MB of ram, and how to fix it. So before ANY errors were showing up, I was thinking (I may stop doing this, as it usually only leads to trouble) that if I made the corrections recommended by MS anyway,  I might be able to squeeze a little more juice out of this old machine. It didn't seem to make any difference. So I changed it back. (everything I modified, I returned to it's original state) Then low and behold.........ERRORS.

Now here is where this gets interesting........ I loaded EVERYTHING I had on the "problem installation drive" onto a fresh clean hard drive. What I mean is, I did fresh installs of everything I had on the first drive, on a second, so-as to have a nice new "un-fixed" drive again, setup