"The Win 16 Subsystem has insufficent resources to continue running"

If you are running some older apps (some of my timekiller card games were written for Win 3.1) and you have been hit with the "The Win 16 Subsystem has insufficient resources to continue running" error message, I found a fix:

http://www.vttoth.com/​wow32.htm

I have been plagued with this since the SP3 upgrade for XP and it looks like this might have done the trick. Been 4 days now, without a problem. It was a bit tricky to swap out the dll (read the page), but what I did was booted to command prompt in safe mode and used the old REN dos command to change the names from wow32.dll to wow32.old and from wow32patched.dll to wow32.dll

Thank you Viktor Toth, whoever you are.

Rad

Radtech1 wrote in post #9599643
If you are running some older apps (some of my timekiller card games were written for Win 3.1) and you have been hit with the "The Win 16 Subsystem has insufficient resources to continue running" error message, I found a fix:

http://www.vttoth.com/​wow32.htm

I have been plagued with this since the SP3 upgrade for XP and it looks like this might have done the trick. Been 4 days now, without a problem. It was a bit tricky to swap out the dll (read the page), but what I did was booted to command prompt in safe mode and used the old REN dos command to change the names from wow32.dll to wow32.old and from wow32patched.dll to wow32.dll

Thank you Viktor Toth, whoever you are.

Rad

Wow... lol. Talk about vintage I don't know why STACKS=9,128 came into my mind when I read your post.

This is what killed so many of the nobel ideas that poor MS programmers had for longhorn, the need for 20yr old legacy support let it go already, let it go.

Pretty sure this is just spam....

I mean, vista and 7 did away with 16bit regardless of the version, xp 64bit also did. Then SP3 for all versions of XP also said screw it to 16bit compatibility.

Just an update for anyone who might be affected by this bug. It has been over two weeks now since I made the fix and I have not had the "insufficient resources" message even once. Previously it was happening every few days, especially if I had quite a few other programs - or multiple (10+) explorer windows open. As far as I can tell, the fix worked.

basroil wrote in post #9600679
Pretty sure this is just spam....

In what sense? Think I'm lying? Trying to sell something/swindle someone? I have nothing to gain by posting this - well, except the the intrinsic reward of helping others who may be similarly situated.

Justify your comment.

basroil wrote in post #9600679
I mean, vista and 7 did away with 16bit regardless of the version, xp 64bit also did. Then SP3 for all versions of XP also said screw it to 16bit compatibility.

But you are right about this - it WAS the SP3 virus for XP that broke my machine. By the time I correctly diagnosed it as that, SP3 was so entrenched there was no going back.

I am just glad to have found a fix (one that MS clearly could have done, but didn't).

Rad

Hi All,

I guess here is a better and simpler solution provided. I tried this and choosing the Windows 98/WE compatibility is working great for me.

Please try this simple approach and see if it works for you as well,

http://www.fixya.com …_16_subsystem_e​rror_close

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But you can try this: Right-click on the executable for the application and select Properties. Click on the Compatibility tab. Check the boxes for 'Run in 256 colors' and 'Run in 640 x 480 screen resolution.' Try running the application again. If you still get the error, go back to the Compatibility tab and check the box 'Run this program in compatibility mode for:' and select the Windows 98/Windows ME in the drop-down list. Try the program again. If that doesn't work, go back to the Compatibility tab again and select 'Windows 95' in the drop-down list and try running the application again. Hopefully, it will run without errors in one of these configurations.
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Regards,
Rahul

Good answer, but I'd hope the OP got it working after almost three years…