If you're talking about disc thrashing and a very slow or unresponsive system it normally happens when you run out of memory so the system resorts to using swap. This can happen with any operating system when the physical memory is too small to support the programs runnning.
I use an Athlon XP 2400+ with 256mb ram. Maybe you're right, maybe that isn't enough RAM for Windows. Well it is for even MANDRAKE and SuSE, and of course Slackware. Running KDE, KDE, and GNOME respectivly.
I've experianced this at work with Windows 2000 and at home with Redhat Linux and at college with Knoppix.
You're using the wroooooooooooong distro
yes I admit I shouldn't have but I needed to open files created on one of our UNIX machines
Why shouldn't you have been using OpenOffice?
I run the beta on this computer, in GNOME, in Slackware, with XMMS and usually Mozilla open at the same time, and it runs like a dream.
the machine I was using only had 128MB of RAM
Shouldn't be a problem... Oh wait, this is in Windows
OK so it could've happened on Fedora too. Or SuSE, or Mandriva. But it WOULDN'T have happened on Slackware with XFCE.
Choice is... Glorious.
and I had sereral large pictures open as well. I switched from one application to another and nothing happend so I just left the computer for 5 miniutes to calm down then I clicked the start menu and it appeared in a few miniutes then clicked shut down and it very slowly closed all the programs asking me to save each file
I've never had such an experience on any GNU/Linux distro, including Mandrake and SuSE. I've had plenty on Windows XP however, and a few on Windows 2000.
interestingly OpenOffice was the only program that crashed.
Wouldn't that have probably been the fault of the OS?
When I started with Linux I used Redhat 9.0 I have 256MB of RAM and this sort of thing used to happen quite often when I opened very large picture files.
Redhat eh? But since, you've discovered Vector Linux, and I see you liked it. So don't use the bloaded Redhat (which, it appears, you may not have enough ram for), just use Vector Linux (which you would definetly have more than enough ram for).
At college I booted up Knoppix including KDE on an old machine with only 64MB of RAM, it was too bad at running small programs like Xpaint but OpenOffice would slow it to a crawl.
Read the bold parts in the quote, you'll understand.
I conclude that this is a memory problem more than and OS problem
I conclude that Windows needs ALOT of ram. Redhat, Fedora and definetly some other GNU/Linux distros are in the same boat.
Slackware and Vector Linux are on a different boat, along with some more GNU/Linux distros, probably some of the BSDs, BeOS, and (feckit) GNU/Hurd. Not Windows, no way.
How ever when I boot up with Vector Linux it's very fast but that's only using Xfce so it's not fair to compare.
What's wrong with using XFCE? XFCE is pretty damn good IMO. What are you missing from GNOME/KDE/Windows?