Long version -
I spent half a day trying to figure out why I suddenly had IE 8 crashing in Windows Server 2008 while working on Sharepoint 2007 WSS development. The DEP exception would lock up IE 8 with a small dialog box indicating that IE had crashed. I tried the standard stuff – going through the add-ons disabling everything and nothing reliably stopped the crashes – except for running IE with no add-ons loaded. I thought it was related somehow to SharePoint 2007 or possibly an exploit of some sort. A day later I found this post above which doesn’t specifically mention IE 8 – but does work for my situation. I think that SharePoint’s interaction with Office 2007 is causing IE 8 to crash.

One really enjoyable overview of the LHC is AlpineKat’s LHC Rap:

My first instinct was to run the Selenium server as a Windows service and I found a forum post that provided a .NET service to do this. The problem is that when the service runs in the LocalSystem’s account context, IE was problematic for enabling the proxy that Selenium RC uses during the invocation of tests.  Trying to modify the service to run as a legitimate user also didn’t work – since the service was running in a different Windows Station and IE did not run correctly in this mode either. 

It turned out the simple solution was to just invoke the Selenium Server from the build batch file and then terminate the server when I was finished with the test. There is a built in command in the command line interpreter named "taskkill" that does the job for me. Here is the .bat file code that I used – and note that the first line kills any java apps that are running so be careful.  I needed this line to abort a server in progress if the script or tests failed and left a java session hanging. My build machine doesn’t have any other java things going on so this worked for me. I’m using nunit to invoke my C# tests contained in "jalisngtests.dll". I’m also using the "sleep" command from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit.

taskkill /f /im java.exe
sleep 5
start "Selenium Server" java ^
-jar C:\selenium-remote-control-1.0-beta-1\^
selenium-server-1.0-beta-1\selenium-server.jar
copy .\bin\debug\*.dll
sleep 20
nunit-console jalisngtests.dll
taskkill /f /fi "WINDOWTITLE eq Selenium Server"

There was a spirited discussion on the show of which would be better – a Q9770 ($1400 3.2 ghz quad) or an  E8500 ($277 3.16 ghz dual core).  There was a common opinion that current games don’t make use of a Quad – that quads are for the future.  However, I experimented around Christmas time with this very issue and found that both Supreme Commander and Crysis did make use of 4 cores.  I posted in the chat room that Crysis did max out 4 cores (as I remembered) but after trying this out again – I was wrong. However, Crysis does make use of 4 cores and I do get a satisfying frame rate on my Q6600/8800GT combo.

Crysis

Here is what my Q6600 utilization is while running Crysis at 1280×1024.  Not maxing out, but more than 2 cores are used. The third and fourth cores seem to get active when guns are fired – tracers, etc. Here is a post on the subject : Intel and Crysis Developers comments on Quad Core – Toms Hardware.

Supreme Commander

This is one of the first games to support a quad core processor. In the following run – I had 2 monitors displaying 1280×1024 and a very large scenario (8 players – 1000 units per). Notice that the four cores are not maxed out, but they are definitely in use. The second core is less loaded than the others but is still in use.

Games that Support Quad Core

Here is the list I found of current games that support a quad core:

Games and Dual/Quad Core Support

From the list:

Games that take advantage of Quad Core:
Alan Wake
Bioshock
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Far Cry 2
Half-life 2: Episode 2
Hellgate: London
Lost Planet
Microsft Flight Sim X
Portal
Rainbow Six Vegas
Source Engine
Splinter Cell Double Agent
STALKER
Stranglehold
Supreme Commander
Unreal Engine 3
Unreal Tournament 3

Not 16 mbits, but I like the almost 2 mbit up.

Well the answer is a tuning parameter that limits how much memory a given desktop application can utilize. This blog post from 2004 describes the problem in detail and has the fix! Windows XP flakiness – solved

I set my SharedSection value to 8096 and I can now open 30 IE windows with no issues. This has bugged me for months and the problem was forming a proper Google search to find this post. Thank you Kevin Dente!