I know you have probably checked all this...but...where is your scratch space assigned too.  I had a problem running out of memory and discovered the assigned scratch area was defaulting to my dedicated program disc...which did not have enough space, I reassigned to another hard drive.

I find both Bridge and also NX2 to be slow movers....Bridge can be lethal of you have a big folder with large files to open, at least on mine it is.

I am only running 2gig ram on XP pro

Art

You could also check under properties on My Computer what your system cache / page file usage allocation is - this can sometimes slow down or crash memory intensive software.

By the way I think XP only can recognise/use 3gigs anyway - you need to go to vista to use 4gigs...

On a related aside do you find Bridge flakey - I use it rather than lightroom to scan through images, select, etc.. and it crashes every 20 minutes or so - just freezes after scrolling through photos

I ran Bridge on an XP Pro laptop with 1 GB of RAM and it was fine - never crashed and was very stable, if perhaps a little slow at times.

Now, on a completely new install on a brand new laptop, it's flakey as hell :( I tried the scratch disk and the page file, both are OK.

Are you booting with the /3GB switch?

No idea

I ran msconfig and in the BOOT.INI tag, there is no mention of this switch? There's an option for MAXMEM which seems to only take a max of 2Gig not 3 (its a drop down box)

The only time I have this happening now is when my page file usage gets up to the set limit   -  i kept the task manager open in the background before so when the errors happend, I could do a quick check. That's me out of ideas :-(

Good suggestion.. I never thought of running the performance manager to see if something was out of memory when Bridge thought it was.

In that case, I'd suggest editing the BOOT.INI file to add the /3GB switch. My recommendation would be to simply copy and paste the Operating system line and then add the /3GB switch. This will effectively create a dual boot machine for you; it's a safer method than just adding the /3GB switch to the original line. If the system freezes you can simply reboot into a normal configuration, but if you don't take the precatution of creating a dual boot setup, if the system freezes, you have to remove the HDD and hook it up to another machine in order to restore the BOOT.INI to it's original configuration.

When you're done your BOOT.INI should include something that looks like this:

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional + 3GB" /3GB /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

One other thing to do is to check the contents of the event log immediately after this happens as this might point to the reason for it happening.

It took a lot of digging.. but got to the bottom of the issue:

"Adobe Bridge CS3 crashes randomly on a multi-processor system"

Adobe Fix