If you’re like me, you go as long as you can without rebooting your PC, even in Windoze. I constantly manage my task list using sysinternal’s process explorer, rooting out bad or dead processes. Eventually, though, Windows runs low on GDI resources (regardless of what they say) and starts to fail with all kinds of basic tasks like repainting, creating menus, opening windows, and even the most basic tasks like properly switching between applications via Alt-Tab. The only way to resolve this is to close tasks, which allows you to regain SOME of the resources, or reboot.
Process explorer can display the number of GDI objects that each task has allocated. Select View->Select Columns->Process Performance->GDI Objects. This can help you determine exactly which process is doing the most damage. Thanks to this guy.
I’ve been using the Gimp a bit lately, and it apparently falls prey to this lack of resources. In the case of the Gimp, it will just plain disappear – no crash window, no warning from Windows, nothing other than the loss of your unsaved work. Or so it appears. If you clean up some, restoring some Windows resources, you can start up the Gimp again, but it won’t be long before it does its disappearing act. Poking around in the task list, I found that every time the Gimp crashed, it was leaving script-fu.exe running. If you kill all running copies of script-fu.exe, and clean up some resources, the Gimp begins to behave again. Paint on!
