june gloom on 14/5/2009 at 18:00

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Just as a disclaimer, I still use AIM 5.2- you couldn't pay me to use a later version or an alternate AIM client. It's worked pretty well for me- it's simple and easy to manage.

From what I understand, there is no direct connect anymore in more recent versions, you just drag and drop the picture you want to send into a window. But 5.2 still requires that you click the "direct connect" button, and when people using later versions want to show me something, my version direct connects like normal- and there's usually no trouble.

But this isn't about weird connection issues between differing versions. This is about something weird I've noticed lately. After I've been using AIM for a while (I will often go several weeks without rebooting) and after I've had enough images IMed to me, my PC starts to act funny. So, for example, if a certain friend of mine decides to annoy me by spamming me with large images of lesbian anime I don't care about, after a while Firefox stops displaying images properly, instead showing them as large black boxes, especially if they are quite large in dimensions (such as a webcomic.) Other things start happening, like games not running properly or at all (Fallout 1 for example kept spitting out "error initializing video mode 640x480" and I couldn't figure out how to fix it until I realized it wasn't an issue with Fallout.)

So the question is, what causes this? By which I mean, how does images in an AIM window affect the entire system?