Correcting a Spare Stack Page error in Windows 95 and Windows 98

Spare Stack Pages Errors in Windows 95 and Windows 98

When you are running Windows 95 or Windows 98, you may receive the following error message:

“ERROR MESSAGE”
There are no spare stack pages. It may be necessary to increase the setting of ‘MinSPs’ in System.ini to prevent possible stack faults. There are currently SPs allocated.

First, the “why” behind it:

This error occurs when Windows 95/98 encounters an internal overflow of the stacks used by 32-bit Windows device drivers. Please note that this is not related to the “Stacks=” line in the Config.sys file, which is used for 16-bit MS-DOS device drivers. Stack overflow conditions are caused by errors in a device driver on your computer. Windows allocates 4 kilobytes, or one page, of space to be used as a stack. If the device driver uses more than 4 kilobytes of memory, a stack overflow condition occurs and you receive the error mentioned above. Windows set a aside a number of extra memory pages, or spare stack pages, to be used temporarily to prevent a system “crash” due to this overflow condition. When overflow condition has passed, Windows 95 reclaims the temporary page. The default number of spare stack pages is 2 in Windows 95 and 5 in Windows 98.

Fixing the problem:

1. Click Start, Run and type in “SYSEDIT” without the quotation marks.
2. This will bring up the System File Editor along with your 5 principle boot files.
3. Click on the edge of your SYSTEM.INI file to bring it forward.
4. Next, scroll down to the [386Enh] section.
5. At the end of the entries under [386Enh] add the following line:

   MinSPs=4

If the problem persists, increase the number of spare stack pages in increments of 4 (for example, 8, 12, 16).

NOTE: Each spare stack page requires 4 kilobytes of memory.