Currently I am updating a manual I wrote 12 years ago. Many of the illustrations were composed in the then-current version of Paint. For the past 4 years I have used Windows 98 and its MS Paint accessory without problems. However recently, every time I start MS Paint the screen blacks out from the top
down, followed by an message and I have to reboot the computer. All other programs appear to work normally and Norton Antivirus 2004 does not detect any problems.

Paint can exhibit this problem when the most previously opened picture was very large. To fix this problem, we will need to reset the size of the default paint canvas to a smaller size. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’ then click OK. In the Registry Editor window that appears, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionAppletsPaintView. In the right-hand pane, locate the value ‘BMPHeight’. Right-click on this value and select ‘Modify. Make sure the base is ‘Hexadecimal’ and set the ‘Value data:’ to ‘e4′ (without the quotes). Click OK. Repeat this procedure to the ‘BMPWidth’ value. Once you have done this, close the Registry Editor and open Paint. This is the most likely solution to the problem. To test this theory, I set the value data to a massive size on my 2.0 GHz desktop computer and the computer slowed to a crawl when Paint opened!