News to me, but hey, welcome news if true.
> From the looks of it, the root-kit is a 64-bit K-mode Windows NT driver. It could not possibly load in a 32-bit Windows NT environment. Unfortunately, if you have massive amounts of RAM available, it becomes inaccessible, since Microsoft removed most of the features of Physical Address Extension. In recent versions of NT, PAE is only used to gain access to the X-D processor feature—preventing the execution of data-segments as code; see D.E.P.
Greater than 4GB isn't "massive", it's just about the minimum required these days for anything other than single-app office apps. Hell, you can barely fit an "About" box message in a megabyte these days.
> Full PAE support existed in Windows 2000 and .NET Server, but was removed in Windows Vista due to problems with video drivers that screwed up when >4GB of memory was available in 32-bit mode.
And Microsoft decided that allowing >4GB in a 32-bit machine would extend the product life of the 32-bit version of XP, and they wanted it gone ASAP.
Microsoft does NOTHING by accident. They screw up, but even that is deliberate (if misguided).
I didn’t get an AMD64 computer until sometime last year.
As a result, I’ve been somewhat conditioned to conserve memory...like the developers and engineers of old...though I would have never been responsible for a Y2K bug, if I travelled across time...and placed in such a situation...