Whe I open several programs (mainly netcaptor and internet explorer,
but also mozilla, notepad...) and continue opening new instances
whithout closing the old ones, there will be a point, where no new
programs will open anymore. Not only that, but menus and dialog boxes
will not pop up either. If I close a few windows I can open some
others until the maximum is reached again.

How can I raise this limit?
(Increasing virtual memory does not seem to help)

(and don't ask why I need so many programs open at once, I don't know myself :-)

CHeck this site out, it can help you with disabling un-neccessary
services that hog up memory and resources:

http://www.blackviper.com/WIN2K/servicecfg.htm

ALso, take a good long look at your Anti-Virus software, see if
disabling it helps with the symptoms. If so, un-install and
re-install. Or go out and get a new one. Best stuff out there is
Trend-Micro. (In my opinion)

Good luck and let us know how you did.

You can add more memory to the machine, and let W2K manage virtual
memory.  This will push the limit out further.  If you keep running
more and more programs (or instances), you'll eventually surpass any
limit, so you may want to reevaluate the need to start more than one
instance of a program.

(Tidbit: I noticed on my Win2K machine, a single instance of Firefox
takes up about 34MB, and each additional instance takes about 100K or
so.  But every instance of IE i run takes about 15MB.  This is not a
rigorous test.)

@athena: had the same experience: a single IE instance uses up much
"resources" (i.e closing one will let me open several other programs)
however using netcaptor (which is a tabbed browser on top of IE) it
seems I can actually open more tabs than using firefox. Right now I
alternate between them both and opera. IE has many disadvantages but
seems to give me the most tabs at the moment


shutting down unneccessary services, or increasing the available ram
might work for a while, and I tried a few of these things already:
only a on-demand virus scanner, no norton software or similar
backround-hogging tools.
I also increased my memory to 512 a while ago, but did not really
notice much improvement

however I was hoping for a more fundamental solution:
I have enough free virtual memory available, why is windows not using
it? I would not mind waiting a minute after each task switch while
windows is swapping unused memory to disk. But it seems there is still
some hard-coded limit for open windows, independent from memory, that
prevents this. (or I misunderstand the concept of virtual memory)


Well, my fundamental problem is that I hate closing webpages. sounds
silly, I know. when I finally close them, i usually bookmark them or
save them to disk first, but still I find it much easier if they just
stay open.