Program too big to fit in memory

Today I got this message on a 32bit Windows XP. Of course first I tried a web search in order to figure out what’s wrong. Nothing useful came up among the numerous matches.

Next I tried to decompress the .exe file (using 7-zip) and what I got were numerous files with familiar names. Next I checked the biggest file and it turned out to be an MS cabinet file, so I unpacked it. Inside I found files in the typical naming scheme for MSIs. So after inspecting the files and finding most of them to be DLLs or EXEs, I took the original “.exe” file, renamed it to .msi and checked whether it opens in Orca. Of course it did, so it turned out to be an MSI installer and could simply be installed.

Lesson learned: check whether the file is really what it pretends to be. The website had offered it as .exe file, but that was wrong.

Maybe this helps someone else,

// Oliver

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2 Responses to Program too big to fit in memory

  1. Christian says:

    Raymond blogged about this interesting problem:
    Why does a corrupted binary sometimes result in “Program too big to fit in memory”?
    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/01/30/519388.aspx

  2. ervin says:

    nice topic!
    it solved my problem.
    thank you

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