To: appro who wrote (11096 ) 7/26/2000 12:34:59 AM From: mr.mark Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 14778 appro, this may be worth a look..."Here's Knowledge Base article regarding it. There Are No Spare Stack Pages -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The information in this article applies to: Microsoft Windows 95 Microsoft Windows 98 Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SYMPTOMS When you are running Windows 95 or Windows 98, you may receive the following error message: There are no spare stack pages. It may be necessary to increase the setting of 'MinSPs' in System.ini to prevent possible stack faults. There are currently <nnn> SPs allocated. CAUSE This error can occur when Windows 95/98 encounters an internal overflow of the stacks used by 32-bit Windows device drivers. Please note that this is not related to the "Stacks=" line in the Config.sys file, which is used for 16-bit MS-DOS device drivers. Stack overflow conditions are indicative of errors in the device driver. Device drivers are allocated 4 kilobytes (one page) of space to be used as a stack. If the device driver uses more than 4 kilobytes of memory, a stack overflow condition occurs. Windows 95/98 sets aside a number of extra memory pages (spare stack pages) to be used temporarily to prevent a system "crash" due to a stack overflow condition. When the stack overflow condition has passed, Windows 95 reclaims the temporary page. The default number of spare stack pages is 2. If Windows 95/98 detects that it has run out of spare stack pages, the warning message stated above is displayed. Windows 95/98 continues to operate normally unless a device driver encounters a stack overflow condition when there are no free spare stack pages. RESOLUTION To resolve this situation, add the following line to the [386Enh] section of the System.ini file and then restart your computer: MinSPs=4 If the problem persists, increase the number of spare stack pages in increments of 4 (for example, 8, 12, 16). NOTE: Each spare stack page requires 4 kilobytes of memory." 32bit.com [edit: looks like increments of 4 is the ticket. here's another similar situation...] windows-help.net good luck :) mark