[Animal]

Okay, every video card uses a portion of system memory to store textures, called the AGP Apperture (sp?)

Now, since you're only running 256MB with XP, XP will use about 200MB of that right off the bat, leaving you with less than 64MB.

Your AGP apperture size is set in the BIOS, usually default is 64 or 128MB. If you don't have enough physical memory left (RAM) after Windows XP has loaded, and the video card attempts to write to memory that is already in use, you'll end up with a crash.

You really need to run at least 512MB with Windows XP for stability.

Intrepid, I would leave it at 64MB unless your video card has less than 64MB on board. There has been a lot of discussion on the correct settings for this, but I've personally tested this setting with a 64MB, 128MB and 256MB video card and seen no benefits to changing from the default 64MB. With 256MB you might want to try going to 32MB, it might speed things up a tad. If you do, let me know how it turns out.