I run visual studio 2010 on a 32bit system and regularly run into issues with running out of virtual memory so I can no longer do things like copy / paste in VS.
I checked out a few options and the Microsoft line on this indicated running with less extensions open, and if that didn't work, use the bcedit /set IncreaseUserVA 3072 command.
That did seem to mitigate the issue, however after about a day of use, suddenly windows starts telling me I'm out of disk space - on a drive with over 100Gb available. For instance it would stop copying a file, saying there was no space to copy it. However clicking "retry" would succeed. Lots of other programs that were writing things to disk would fall over regularly. (Including Skype...why were you writing to the disk all the time, Skype?!)
I ran chkdsk and did other basic checks before concluding that my configuration change must be responsible. Fortunately restoring the default setting worked and I'm now back in action.
Most articles (except, notably, Microsoft's) on IncreaseUserVA say "Use at your own risk", and clearly I did, and lost. But can anyone explain why this behaviour was exhibited / what can go so wrong with what appears to be a legitimate change to Windows 7 configuration?
For the record - the machine was a dell Vostro Laptop with a 260Gb / 5400rpm disk drive, 3.2Gb (effective) RAM, running Windows 7 with all updates prior to SP1.