More Anti-Virus Woes

I was lucky enough to recieve a copy of 'The Orange Box' from my wife for Christmas. I had a few minutes to get it installed and I tried the first few minutes.

Shortly after the game started I got an onscreen warning that read:

Warning: Paged Memory Pool Low

After a few minutes the game locked with looping sound in the background, just as Half Life 1 Episode 1 used to. For Half Life 1 I found a start up parameter that forced the game to run in direct X8 mode, which solved the problem. I wasn't excited about the solution but was able to play the game.

I did not have the warning in Episode 1. With this new error message and some quick research I found many forum hits and this official support article.

The article said:

In practice, we have found that certain anti-virus applications allocate a large amount of paged pool memory that cannot be freed until the anti-virus software is fully uninstalled from the system. AVG 7.x, Norton and NOD32 have been identified as anti-virus packages that allocate large amounts of paged pool memory and directly interfere with Source engine games. If disabling these applications does not help with the issue, you may want to consider uninstalling the anti-virus application to diagnose the cause of the crash.

I did not want to run with out AV. Totally disabling it, including the resident shield did not help. I pulled it off just to see with the intention of putting back right away. Sure enough the game ran fine. (UGH! Antivirus. Can't live with it, can't live without it.)

I am running a different AV program for the moment. YUCK!