I've developed C++ in VS 2005 SP1 and now using VS 2008 SP1 .I can say that Visual Studio 2005 was clumsy and slow , VS 2008 is way too much worse than Vs 2005. In every new version nothing but bugs and instabilities injected into Visual Studio. And C++ developers use VS because it's the currently the best one in C++ development( 3rd party tool like Visual AssistX,Incredibuild, debugging and etc..).But this doesn't mean Visual Studio gives C++ developers an IDE that satisfies current development necessities of a project. I'm watching Eclipse CDT and with a new version i see better integration and further progress in IDE. So if it continues like that i can say that future of C++ development seems like CDT. Microsoft has only one chance to change this and it's VS 2010.In VS C++ blogs, they promise VS 2010 will be good. We'll wait and see what's going to happen

[AGP]

First of all , Problem could be memory leak or anything related with memory management.Your application may be trying to access a memory area that it's not allowed to. Virtual memory is usage of hard-drive(or similar devices) space as memory area.Simply data is kept in drive as specified file.There are many virtual memory management algorithms that decides how,when and what to fetch.But it's performance is never as good as accessing real memory.Virtual Management is a trade-off between memory size and memory speed. Also if you are programming a WIN32 application , memory allocation functions calls a specified system function that automatically allocates real or virtual memory.

[AGP]