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For years now, I’ve had numerous Windows problems dealing with some kind of hard-coded “limit” one some manner of resources that Windows allocated to displaying windows. There were multiple symptoms - Internet Explorer would open without displaying anything but a logo, no tool bar or page or address bar. Notepad would come up only with a title bar and a gray background everywhere else. Many applications simply refused to open. Now, let’s be honest here, it’s only when I was doing heavy work and had about 50 IE windows already opened - but I build a fast computer with lots of memory, there should be absolutely no reason that I couldn’t fully utilize these resources to do work. I thought perhaps Windows had a “maximum number of open windows” problem, or

I found an article that shed light on the subject over at http://weblogs.asp.net/kdente/archive/2004/06/04/148145.aspx. As it points out, Microsoft has a Knowledge Base article that discusses the problem, however, it bases itself on the “Out of Memory” message that apparently comes up (for other people, as it never did for me). The answer - change your GDI heap size!

I quote:

Finally, during my umpteenth round of Googling, I ran across a thread that described a problem very similar to my own. One of the responses in the thread mentions a registry setting that increases the size of the desktop heap. According to a somewhat dated but still relevant MS KB article, “this static value is used to prevent ill- behaved applications from consuming too many resources”. Well, apparently it IE meets the “ill-behaved” criteria, because it seemed to cause Windows to bump into this limit, and Windows wasn’t handling it very gracefully. Anyway, to make a long story longer, when I bumped up the desktop heap size (from its default of 3MB up to 8MB), bingo, all of the problems magically disappeared. Whew, what a relief.

To make this change, navigate regedit to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Session Manager\\SubSystems. The “Windows” value contains a big honkin’ string, and one part of it is “SharedSection=xxxx,yyyy,zzzz”. The second number (yyyy) is the one that you want to increase. Standard registry editing disclaimers apply, YMMV.

I found this years ago, but it’s not so easy to search back out, and I lost the references again until recently. Hopefully, someone will find my description useful enough to find the solution. Slashdot had a discussion on this years ago. Additionally, Microsoft has recently reviewed the Desktop Heap, and posted various default settings for their operating systems.