poormans cron hoses web server

see node for other users complaining
http://drupal.org/node/121077#comment-202847

Folks after much investigation and plain old delete and reinstall I have nailed down my web server crashes to poormans cron. I run a innovation database on windows 2003 platform.

my initial error was IIS crashes and then when I tried with Apache it crashed too.

FATAL: emalloc(): Unable to allocate 1073741825 bytes
[Sun Feb 18 22:50:28 2007] [warn] (OS 64)The specified network name is no longer available. : winnt_accept: Asynchronous AcceptEx failed.

I have increased the memory limit in php.ini to a large amount 100 MB. It still dint help.

I upgraded to drupal 5... removed all modules and slowly started adding modules. Its crashes too when I add poormanscron.
Tried every combination and it always fails at poormans cron.

so what do i need to do to fix this. I need poormans cron for crop scripts. please help. I am at a loss for any other solutions