System menus and GUI elements stop working after some time

[Blade2001]

After about 24 hours of normal usage (web browsing, viewing/editing images etc) my PC can't display system menus anymore. It doesn't report errors, simply doesn't do it. After a while, I even can't open explorer windows anymore too.
I have 512 Megs (Windows2000), and still about 300M free, so it's not a simple "out of memory" situation.

I can't even imagine the reason for this behaviour and my previous PCs and the ones I use at work never had a similar problem, despite I install almost the same apps.

Someone talks about memory leaks, but I don't know how to know which app is doing this.

Please give me some advice, thanks...

 

[RealBlackStuff]

There is a free utility out there, MaxMem from www.analogx.com
This checks your memory at regular intervals to keep it fresh. You can also manually 'nudge' it to free up more memory.
I run W2K with this util, and it is rock-steady.

 

[DragonMaster]

Have you done:
- Windows Update?
- Registry Scan? (Latest free jv16 PowerTools available at oldversion.com + M$ RegClean)
- Spyware check?
- Virus check?

You could tweak your PC with CacheMan also.

 

[Spike]

Is that Util any better in your experience than FreeRAM XP, RBS?

If so I may give it a shot.