Memory Leak with Network Card

Question

Hi, I have an Inspiron 7000 running Windows XP professional.  I just installed a Netgear WG511 802.11g card and I keep running out of virtual memory (after a few hours).  I did a bunch of analysis (including poolmon.exe) and figured out that something is using up nonpaged memory which is then using virtual memory.  I can see the nonpaged memory use creeping up every update cycle.  The memory tagged Thre (Threads?) is allocating much nonpaged memory but is not deallocating it. I contacted Netgear and they said that it was a hardware problem.  I have an Ethernet card installed which also seems to be leaking memory, but at a much much slower rate.  Also, I tried a DLINK wireless card and it also appears to be leaking memory.  Also, the Netgear card does not cause this problem on my other machines. I contacted Netgear and they said it was a hardware problem (though I suspect it is the OS).  So, since they said that, I have thrown my issue on this board hoping someone can help me.  Any ideas? Thanks, penn13

jwatt · Answer

Memory leaks are always software related. You said that you only observed the problem on one of two machines with the Netgear card. Are the two machines both running XP Pro, with the same Windows Updates installed? Is the version of the driver for the WG511 the same on both systems?

The fact that your Ethernet adapter is exhibiting the same symptom at a slower rate suggests an XP OS component rather than a vendor-supplied driver. You'll find lots of hits searching Google for xp network memory leak. Some of them may suggest things you hadn't considered. Check both the "Web" and "Groups" searches at Google.

Jim

Networking, Internet, & Bluetooth

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