Thoughts as to what could have caused the memory error since my research has covered the full spectrum?
From your description of the problem, everything seems to be very consistent:
- Your combination of scenery settings and addons installed required a lot of memory.
- Under a 32 bit OS, regardless of how much total RAM you have, everything (OS, all apps running including FS9 and it's addons) will have to *share* 4GB of RAM maximum. On top of that, the VRAM on your video card will *subtract* from that available memory so, with a 1GB video card, you have roughly 2.6 GB available for all your apps, as soon Windows starts. It's not the full 3GB, because other resources (like mainboard cards, bios, firmwares, etc.) will map into that memory too. And of course, Windows itself has already loaded drivers and basic services when it starts, so by the time it has finished loading, you have about 2.5-2.6GB free for your apps.
- If you haven't patched FS9.EXE to use 3GB, you don't even have those 2.6GB, you have 2GB for FS9. But even if you had, that patch can't create memory out of thin air: on a 32 bit OS you would never be able to use more than those 2.6GB anyway.
- When the system is low on memory (total allocation went more than 4GB) it will SWAP to the hard drive, using it as a memory buffer. THIS will cause heavy stutters, since hard drive access is about 100 times slower than from RAM. Even SSDs are slower than real RAM (although are of course much better than mechanical hdd)
- If your hard drive was either low on available space or, even worse, defective (and you are shortening its life by making it swapping a lot), having kernel errors and blue screens is very likely.