Can't Set Paging File

[Bluewombat59]

I'm reposting this as I'm not sure anyone saw it at the tail end of another posting and I havn't had any response. I can see from postings that there are a couple of people out there with similar problems, so I'm sure any ideas would be appreciated by all.

My problem:
I have been receiving an error at start up that I have "no paging file or paging file is too small" Trying to set the paging file size through System Properties/ Advanced/ Performance Settings, and the numbers seem to stick (yes, I press "set"), but on restart the same message pops up.

I have an 1.2 athlon, 75 GB HD with 20 GB free, plus a second 50 GB drive, both FAT32, XP Home

Here's what I've tried:

*zeroing out paging file size, restarting, then resetting and restarting doesn't eliminate the message.
*setting to let the system manage virtual memory doesn't do anything.
*starting in safe mode, and setting up paging file size makes no difference (in case some other program is affecting it).
*I reinstalled the IDE controllers, ran checkdisk, defragged the main HD
*Have tried resetting values in the registry, deleted registry references to TempPageFile, and searched, but didn't find references to TPkd as someone suggested.
*Searched for Pagefile.sys (unhiding sys files) and even tried someone's trick of copying an old text file over to that file name, then deleting it, but to no avail.
*I don't have the intel chipset.
*I have Norton Systemworks 2003, but I believe problems I've seen listed are with the 2004 version - besides I did a clean boot with the same lack of results.
*Someone suggested changing the Paging File name to a different name (ex: Pagefil2.sys), in case the existing file is corrupt, but I still get the same message.
*I tried a system restore back to about a week ago, but Windows says it can't complete the restore.

I know others have had the same problem. Any Ideas???

[ESALADUANE]

Have you seen this one?

"Error Message: Your System Has No Paging File, or the Paging File Is Too Small" - This error message may occur if Windows tries to create a paging file on an NTFS volume, but the System and Administrators accounts do not have the correct NTFS permissions on the volume.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;315270

[Bluewombat59]

I did, but I have FAT32, not NTFS, so it doesn't apply - right?

[ESALADUANE]

Sorry, I missed that in your post.

[rapoth]

I have been fighting this problem for months and gone thru many of your listed fix attempts. Today I decided to down load and apply Intel's Application Accelerator ver 2.3
even though I didn't know how to determine if I actually had the chipsets referenced in microsoft articles.

After install and reboot, System Properties finally shows my selected paging file size and the "no paging file" window no longer appears on boot.

[Bluewombat59]

Well, I finally solved it. Went in to add/remove programs and started removing programs I'd recently installed. Also some stuff I didn't recognize, that I believe was Adware one of my kids probably let slip in.

Because I deleted a couple of programs at a time (got tired of rebooting), I can't be certain of the culprit, but highly suspect it was a copy of Seagate Backup Exec which I had re-installed "temporarily" to try and pull some data out of an old backup file. This version of Backup Express is a few years old and is identified as not XP compatible, but seemed to install OK and since I needed something from the backup file I didn't worry about it. well...if I'm right, my lack of short term memory about the install led to the rest. Sigh. In any case, problem resolved.