Problem running Tomcat as a service

[Emacs77]

Hello. This is my configuration:
SO: Windows 2003 Server 32bit
RAM: 4gb (3.9 says task manager, 3.2 free)
VMWare: yes
Cluster: yes, I have two nodes with same configuration
Tomcat version: 5.5.28

I need to allocate at least 2048mb as maximum memory pool. As long as I keep this number under 1620 (in tomcatw) the service starts successfully (but then my webapp crashes in a few steps), while when I set it to something more than 1620 I get the following message from windows:
"windows could not start the apache tomcat on local computer", and it says application error code is 0 and to look into the system event log. System event log doesn't add anything useful ("The Apache Tomcat service terminated with service-specific error 0 (0x0).").
stdout log says: "Error occurred during initialization of VM Could not reserve enough space for object heap". Now, task manager says I've got 3931592 physical memory of which 3276528 available. Initial system paging file is set to 1536mb, with a maximum of nearly 4gb.
On a different machine with same configuration (but not clustered) I've got no problems setting the maximum memory pool to 4096mb so I cant' imagine what the problem could be. Thanks in advance...

 

[Diancecht]

Same happens running tomcat with a regular user? What switches are you using?

Cheers,
Dian

 

[Emacs77]

ok it seems to work if I start it using startup.bat, with my user.

But (sorry for this question I'm quite new to tomcat usage) do the configuration set in tomcat5w works only for services? perhaps when I startup "normally" I must specify memory usage in the command line?

my java options are the default ones, I'm not using particular switches other than xms (512) and xmx (2048).