System memory being hit despite an upgrade in V-RAM
 

Graphics sub-system getting worse, so called card makers again. He said that although I had 500mb of video ram, if a piece of software was not written to use it, the system memory would still be burdened. Can this be correct?

Flight Sim was unusable and the question raised on the other thread about the HD running all the time, can now be answered in the affirmative.

Technically... he is right, if a bit disingenuous. However, if you're talking about "Flight Sim" (Microsoft, I presume) it is written to use all the Video RAM you can throw at it.

It sounds very much like your system is paging memory out to the hard disk.

How much system RAM do you have? And how big is your swap file?