A guildie of mine has been having terrible issues with CTDs. Basically he has found that when the physical memory gets exhausted and attempts to page out to the page file (hence a huge amount of disk activity), his system would drop to the desktop.

I have a similar problem, when physical ram gets exhausted and attempts to page out to the page file I will freeze for 7-10 seconds, at which point my physical ram drops down to around 25% utilization and my page file is utilized more.

The difference between my system and his is that my system is a bit more powerful (7800GT vs. his 7300GS, Dual -core AMD 3800+ vs. his Pentium 4 D 2.8 GHZ, Serial ATA II vs. his PATA 100 drive), so I am guessing that I am indeed having the same problem, but my system is able to page out fast enough so that DAoC doesn't crash.

This has to do with the infamous memory leak that has been plaguing DAoC for a while now. There was a monstrous thread recently (11+ pages) about this memory leak problem, and it was suggested that some people were able to avoid or significantly delay this problem by increasing there system RAM. I have 1GB now, moving to 2 within the next few days.

My guildie increased his ram from 1GB to 3GB and has not experienced the problem (though after a few hours running in the frontier game.dll takes up 1.8GB or more of memory... ouch).