asked on

How do I increase the Windows handle limit?

I have found this solution twice and lost it three times.

When I open an unholy number of windows, I will get to a point where I cannot open any more, or where an app can't even open a dialog box.

Somewhere out there there is a registry setting that can be increased to allow more window handles. It is in a registry key that consists of a text string with comma-separated values, and the one I'm looking for is the middle value, and I believe defaults to 2MB, entered in K.

Anyone know where it is?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

jkr

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

PaulGideon

ASKER

Thanks jkr, your answer was part of what I was looking for.

The other part is not a handle limit, but rather the Desktop Heap. As in:

http://newsletter.neoticker.com/?p=175

Which says:
<quote>
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems\Windows

This entry is a very long string and part of this string should contain the SharedSection setting.

Modify the SharedSection from something like,

SharedSection=1024,3072,4096

to

SharedSection=1024,8192,4096

Then reboot the machine to make the changes take effect.

Each value in the SharedSection represents the maximum usage per specific type of access into windows.

The middle value that we just modified is the one that is responsible for providing desktop heap to the desktop used by a single login to the system. The increase from 3072 to 8192 will allows at least 120 windows to be created without intervention from Windows XP
</quote>

Thanks again!

jkr

You're most welcome. But, NOTE that there is a difference between GDI handles (they are only related to the Graphical Device Interface) and other 'handles', which include all other named objects in Windows and are what you see when monitoring the handle count using the task manager (just nitpicking ;o)