Catrhis: I must say that i never heard of this problem, sorry to say it but i have played with 3 different computers and two different OS with this game, and never had any significant issues
The problem must come from somewhere else, what are your system spec?
Are you graphic card driver set to default for this game?
Any other unnecessary program running while playing? Beside the usual antivirus/antispyware
KOTOR should consume between 200 and 500 Mb of ram while playing, on certain newer OS it may peak for a moment to even 1Gb but that's it, it immediately return down to that range
jerm1027: Specs:
-Intel Core i5 2500k @ 4GHz (<- stable, completed 20 hours of Prime95 w/o error or throttling)
-4x2GB of DDR3-2000 memory @ 1866MHz
-GTX 760 Superclocked @ 1071MHz (factory OC'd)
-Windows 7 Home Premium x64
The only modifications I'm running would be Flawless Widescreen which allows me to play at my monitor's native resolution of 2560x1080.
It's not a matter of your system being incapable of running KOTOR, it's just that for some reason it seems to cache in memory pretty much the whole game without cleaning up
You still haven't said what other programs you have running while playing, maybe some "optimizer" program that end up screwing up this old game loading process
I can try to give a few suggestions and tell us on the forum how it goes:
1) Download a free program called "Process Explorer" from here:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027 It's pretty much a significantly improved task manager that allow the user to monitor the system capacity and usage without having to keep open 3 different windows
Among the other thing it tell the user the GPU usage and it may help you narrow the problem
This program will allow you to easily identify what program is effectively using all your RAM
2) Try to completely disable your graphic card driver AI programs, for ATI cards it's CCC (Catalyst Control Center), not sure Nvidia cards program name but i am sure there is an equivalent
Disabling it completely means forcefully shutting down ALL the process related to it, so that your card work only using it's basic drivers
If an AI function is badly mismanaging the game, could be just that. It would be far more probable that it would eat up your graphic card memory tough, not the RAM
3) Try to shut down all programs not windows related, pretty much everything, with a few exception, that is not categorized under SYSTEM under the USER tab in the task manager
4) Try to run KOTOR with 800x600 resolution, i know it's a pain especially for the various menu, but you may want to try it anyway, see if there is a difference in the memory usage from the game
5) If nothing work, try to run KOTOR with no mod installed, or at least no mod that alter the graphic quality or allow bigger resolutions etc.
A minor incompatibility between process and used memory may be what it's causing you this kind of problem, in fact it seems, from your description, that the game is waiting for the system to clean up memory but it doesn't, maybe because it "marked" as being in use for some reason
Know for sure that vanilla KOTOR don't to that
BTW, it's your widescreen mod changed your .exe to allow bigger resolutions? I remember a mod that did just that for KOTOR/KOTOR2, if the AOB sequence is incorrectly applied it may have compromised part of the executable
Usually this kind of problem just immediately crash the game, but depending on what has been altered, it may do far worse