I recently built my roomate a new computer. However, when he attempts to play WoW while using only a few other programs (the most memory intensive of which are Firefox or BitComet), his computer complains about not having enough virtual memory. Without WoW running, he's using slightly less than the full 512 which is odd, but he's only got 38 running processes and Firefox/BitComet are taking only ~80MB a piece (Im also currently running some antispyware/virus stuff to be sure). I manually set his virtual memory to 1024, which has always been more than enough for me, but then it comes up with the low virtual memory error again and bumps the thing to around 3072.

Specifics:
-He's using the same copy of Windows XP Pro that I have on my machine.
-BIOS and Windows both show 1GB RAM
-MEMTEST86+ has done more than 20 passes with 0 errors
-Patriot 1GB (512x2)
And just incase: -Biostar TForce4U

After writing this post, I went ahead and popped onto his computer which has NOT been rebooted anytime soon. He must have had WoW minimized to have taken up so much of what I thought was idle ram because it has 670MB free while idle, and 550MB free with WoW. He reported that Windows' virtual memory cravings occured at the time of WoW start-up into the main menu, not just in computer-intensive areas. Since I cant get the problem to come up right now, I cant give any more details than I have. Does anyone have any ideas as to what's going on, or any similar cases?

You certainly need to reboot Win at least every few days. The OS and programs all have memory leaks and other minor bugs which accumulate and lead to problems such as what you're describing.

Ive found the problem, but dont know how to fix it. When I check the page file usage on my computer, it's always under 500MB (its 212MB right now). When the problem happened on his machine again, it showed the PF usage as 2.68GB, and without BitComet, WoW, or anything else major running, it only had 400MB out of the entire 1GB available of ram. Now, I dont know the link between page file usage and RAM, but Im assuming its the GIANT PF size that is causing the memory usage. What could be causing this? Ive already run a full virus/spyware scan, and nothing was found.

I had a similar problem some time ago and cleaning the registry helped alot (altough to completly fix the issue i had to format and reinstall OS), give it a try, also, if you'v been using some math apps (like matlab or similar) try restarting after you'r done because iterative calculations build up HUGE PF's

Hope it helps

Assuming you have restarted the computer, bring up Windows Task Manager with CtrlAltDel, and look at the "Processes" tab, looking for processes that are taking up a lot of CPU time, and any that have very high Mem Usage. Report back (note: System Idle Process takes up all the CPU time not used by other processes, so don't worry if it's high).