I'm not too familiar with OS and processor tasking / usage but whenever I run different programs at once; for instance 3 different applications all in visual studio a lot of memory is used. I understand that visual studio on its own uses a lot of memory and CPU power and depending on the program creates many USER objects etc.

My machine has 2GB of RAM and a 2.13 dual core CPU. The problems arise when writing to files and one program will crash when trying to access a file that is only accessible by that application, yet gets errors that it was unable to access the file.

Does this make sense? Does the number of applications running at once affect the execution? I mean, is this just probably an issue with my code or should I restrict the number of applications running at once?