XnView Software

not sure what you mean by browser - if i close XnView browser then i effectively close the whole program, don't I?
BTW I think I jinxed it Sometimes this happens after only 20 MB worth of images. It's very inconsistent

It takes me about 300 MB worth of jpg files (around 1 MB each) in 30 subfolders to reach 1.5 GB of RAM taken up by XnView at which point the "File can't be loaded" error pops up when I try to go from browsing to opening an image (and if I just scroll then the images turn up pixelated - I guess that ...

no, I scroll them

nope, didn't help

Whenever I look through some heavy pictures the program gradually takes up more and more RAM. At some point pictures become pixelated until it says it can't open any more files. I have to exit and restart the program which is annoying. In ACDSee there was an option "keep previous image in memory ...