memory leak, HELP :(

crap. i had this writen and i pushed the back button on my mouse -_-

my pc:
a64 3200+
dfi nf4 ultra-d
2x512 ddr400 gskill GBLA
xFx 7600gt xXx
hitachi sata 2 160 Gb hdd

when playing guildwars for a more or less long period of time, and changing maps frecuently, ram usage starts to build up. (i have a logitech g15, and i can se ram and cpu usage displayed in its lcd), when its about 80% used, i usally have sound crash issues (issues that your suport couldn't solve a month ago, when the cahge to dx9 was introduced, but i didnt have the g15 at that time, so i didnt know my ram was about to run out ). when ram is about 85% used, the game starst to run slower.
i can "fix" that by closing and reopening the game, but its troublesome sometimes.

after a long run today (played like 3 hours without closing the game, changing maps MANY times), my free memory was as low as 33Mb, GW.exe was using 440 Mb, but when i closed the game, my free memory jumped from 33 mb, to 820 -_- (10 minutes before, i had lost sound as i explained in my first mail, and playing through a mission with so much ram in use, was really choppy and hard)

any help would be apreciated (reinstalling the game doesnt help, and i tell you this in advance, cause its always the first and MOST AWFULL answer i got each time i asked about the sound issue).

i have a 2nd pc with another GW account, and it seems to have no probems (its an older pc, with an athlon XP, nf2, ati 9550)

ram checked with memtest, pc stability with prime95, all is good, no trojans, no viruses.

only solution so far would be to buy 2x1024, but its to expensive here

You need to do a virus scan and spyware scan first. Something is there that shouldn't be there.

Second, you may need to reinstall windows. Either of those should fix it, but GW.exe is not your issue.

Glad I was trolling the area, that is a real issue. Tell us how you come out on scans, I wanna follow this one.

i did a spyware scan with spybot search and destroy, and the suport team asked me to use "highjakthis" and it didnt reveal anything either.

i was using nod32 (my last format + windows reinstall was a month ago or so, and i decided to try it again, because i used to use it before, but i had changed to kaspersky).

nod32 saw no virus, but for the sake of it, i uninstalled it and went back to kaspersky, and no virus was found either

today im getting the last parts of my pc mod form a friend, when i finish building my new custom case ill do a clean install once again.

in the meantime, is it posible that a particular setting in windows, like disableing "pagingfileexecutive" (tells windows not to page OS info/files, which takes more ram, but makes it run faster), or other memory tweaks that tell windows not to use the page file unless its necesary (conservative page file usage for example), or many others that i cant remember right now, be causing this ?

all this BEGAN the thay they updated GW for the last factions preview event, when it started using dx9.

but this problem was happening way slower in tyria, now in cantha, it takes 2 ours AT MOST for my gamplay to degrade to the "no sound + mega slowdowns".

It could be that your video card is offloading resources to your Ram. If you want to test this, go back and forth between two small maps. If it doesn't build up, then its a good chance its that. Or better yet stay in one area with alot of baddies (fighting is probably the most intensive aspect of that game).

Im guessing (if its not a virus or something else hogging it) that your video card is using your Ram to store quick-acces textures. This is why it goes up after you visit many different maps.

The only reason I am forced to think it IS Guild Wars is because the ram is reset once you exit it and all the graphics threads are ended.

and how can i stop this from happening ?

changing maps continually will load my ram more and more, but as you said, fighting will make it happen even faster.

just leaving my char in a town wont make ram usage to grow tho (or so i think).

freaking 7600gt with 256 mb for nothing

Yeah, your video card is telling me that I'm wrong. If you could try those tests it would help. Like leave your guy in town and go eat or something and record the Ram jump. Also try to see what the change is between maps.

im going to have dinner now, my ele is in fort aspenwood now.

if i go, for example, to kaineng center, since its bigger and full of people, more ram is used instantly, but i dont know if it jumps or not.

i changed to -dx8 to see if it helped, but ram usage was like with dx9.

ill report what happens when i get back from dinner.

just leaving it at fort aspenwood seems to very slowly increase memory usage.

just walking in and out of fort aspenwood once and again, seems to up memory usage by "1%" after a cuple of "travels".

zoning to diferent maps using the world map uses more ram than changing betwen 2.

can any of this settings be causing this problem ?

;-----
;----- Increase IoPageLockLimit (disk cache)
;-----
;----- Note- Use the following settings depending on your system RAM:
;----- 00020000 = 131072 KB (if RAM > 512 MB)
;----- 00010000 = 65536 KB (if RAM > 256 MB)
;----- 00008000 = 32768 KB (if RAM > 128 MB)
;----- 00004000 = 16384 KB (if RAM > 64 MB)
;----- 00002000 = 8192 KB (if RAM > 32 MB)
;----- 00001000 = 4096 KB (if RAM < 32 MB)
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"IoPageLockLimit"=dword:00020000

;================
;RAM usage tweaks
;================
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001
"SecondLevelDataCache"=dword:00000100

i played for almost 2 hours on another pc, (nf2, an athlon xp overcloked to 2000 mhz, 1 gb, radeon 9550 128 mb), i copied my gw.dat to that pc (cause my brother there stoped playing a while ago and had no factions maps) and the problem is there too.

is there a remote posibility that my gw.dat is corrupted somehow, causing this ? redownloading the almost 4gb again would be painfull

if you have the factions CDs thats a majority of the code so the rest of the DL would not be that bad. you said earler that windows was seeing GW as 400 MB but when GW ended your free RAM increased by almost 800. that sounds like a problum i had a while ago were all of my processes were taking almost double the RAM as they were reporting. at the time it did not effect my playing of GW but it caused Civilization 4 to become jumpy after it was left on. after i reinstalled windows the double ram usage was fixed. a tool i came across in my search for a fix was this http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilitie...sExplorer.html
you can set it to graph individule processes so that might provide some kind of insite.

what is the ram usage on GW after a few hours for everyone else? anyone with a computer with close to the same stats.

i already have proces explorer, but it showedinfo similarto the one the taskmanager was displaying.

im prepearing a windows cd for a clean isntall now, will try it tomorw i think.

still accepting ideas.

i will reinstall windows soon tho.