TSGL: Windows low memory error

[Mike Cassidy]

I'm trying to help a friend with her PC which was very, very slow. It is a
Packard Bell (now serviced by NEC) EasyNote M5-270DW notebook (Model No:
PN05000559) with 2.7GHz Celeron, 256Mb RAM, DVD-CDRW Combo, 28GB HDD (Volume
C: 26Gb, Volume Backup: 2Gb, On Board Intel Video Card (which appears to be
sharing 16Mb of memory from the RAM), Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP1
and Microsoft Office Student & Teacher Edition 2003.

Besides being so slow, she was getting an intermittent error message:
Windows - Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low: Your system is low on virtual
memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file.
During this process, memory requests from some applications may be denied.
For more information, see Help.

I could not find any reference to this condition in the Help system.

MS Knowledge Base Article ID: 926218 (30 Oct 06) is the only hit on
searching the KB for "Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low". It says the error
applies to MS Internet Security & Accelerator Server 2006 Enterprise
Edition, MS Internet Security & Accelerator Server 2006 Standard Edition, MS
Internet Security & Accelerator Server 2004 Enterprise Edition, and MS
Internet Security & Accelerator Server 2004 Standard Edition.

She had Norton 360 security suite installed and tried to use its backup
feature to backup to CD. It took some 10 hours to get to the 8th CD before
it stalled.

I was able to do a backup of her data to an external USB HDD. Then, using
the backup volume, reformatted the HDD and re-loaded Windows XPSP1. I then
applied SP2 from CD. The restore installed Word 2002 (but it did not appear
in the Add/Remove program list in Control Panel. When I installed Office
2003 there was a prompt to remove the previous version of Word which I did.
I then reloaded her other programs and connected her Internet. About this
time, we got the same error message: Windows - Virtual Memory Minimum Too
Low.

Can anyone advise why this is occurring and how to resolve it, please?

MikeC