Inability to Open Files May Be Caused by Bad Registry Key (156316)

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If the values of the PagedPoolSize or NonPagedPoolSize parameter in the system registry is incorrectly specified, various Windows NT kernel mode components may be unable to allocate sufficient memory to function normally. These values are located in the following registry key:
\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Ordinarily, the value of these parameters is set to zero, which indicates that Windows NT should compute default values for resource allocation. Nonzero values override the default computation, and should be avoided in most circumstances. Please remember that any value entered is a hard limit. This means that these values can be used to only limit memory to a SMALLER value than the automatic system calculation, these values cannot ever be used to increase the memory setting. So in all situations there is no reason to ever enter non zero values. This is because the optimal settings will depend on the amount of memory actually installed.

When an application opens a file, Windows NT file systems must be able to allocate a certain amount of memory to keep track of various information about the file on behalf of the application. In general, the larger the file, the more memory will be required. Therefore, in low memory situations, attempting to open or copy a large file may fail, while it is still possible to open or copy smaller files.

In extreme cases, file system corruption can even take place if memory settings are incorrect. This file corruption is not likely to take place on a correctly configured system, even in very low memory situations. Rather, when the PagedPoolSize and/or NonPagedPoolSize parameters have been set to inappropriate nonzero values, other internal resource allocations may be "thrown off," resulting in the potential for corruption.