InDesign 2.0.2 & Out of Memory

Question

I just want to state first I have searched everywhere and for every phrase I can think of, and while I have found a couple hits as to the cause, nothing has fixed this issue...
Background:
I work for a rather large media company who owns a mixture of online and print publications. We have been using InDesign 2.0.2 since it's release, and I have been one of the main persons responsible for it's usage in our workflow for the past 4 years. There have been a number of informal discussions, and even a formal discussion or two, about migrating the templates we use to InDesign CS3 which we also have licenses and installs for. However, that migration project keeps getting pushed aside for more important projects. So please keep in mind that upgrading, for us, is not an option in order to resolve this issue at this time.
A Quick Overview of What We Do:
There are two main products that we offer our child companies - One product for the companies themselves to list vehicles for their clients (in this product their clients are car dealerships), and another product for a private party (e.g., Joe Blow internet user) to list their cars for sell. Both applications run a fairly similar process in that they hand off data gathered from the websites to a custom built application. That application can be considered a parent application, and it then distributes work to its children processes which run on several different servers. Four of those servers run our InDesign processes.
Two of our InDesign machines are physical dedicated servers with a quad core CPU, and 2GB of RAM with 2GB swap. The other two InDesign machines are runnning as VMWare virtual machines with 2 CPU cores and 2GB of RAM with 2GB swap. All four machines are Windows Server 2003, and all files (artwork, XML files) in which these machines use to build the final output file are remotely connected via a file server.
In the past we've seen the issue I am about to describe on our virtual machines only, and on only one machine at a time. Each time we have corrected the issue by simply re-deploying that virtual machine and the InDesign application. However, now it's spread over to our physical boxes too, and currently happening on all four machines at this point in time.
The Problem and What We Have Tried:
As stated earlier, we run a parent/child setup on various servers where the parent hands off work to it's children processes whom are connected in a client/server model via a TCP connection. These children perform a single function - to process data dumped from the websites ultimately into an XML format readable by InDesign. There are other steps and XML outputs, but this is the only one that matters for this discussion.
This child then reports back to the parent that it has completed its work, and the parent will pass that work off to one of our InDesign servers. The child will then automatically launch InDesign, and InDesign will open the files it needs in order to populate various elements in the INDT file. This consists of EPS/PDF/JPEG images for Headers, Footers, Vehicle Images, etc. and also populates certain strings in the document to those read from the XML document to automate the population of the data. Basically we feed it some image files, an INDT, and an XML, and it gives us back a pretty PDF.
The problem that we're seeing is that upon opening some of our INDT files on these machines, InDesign will immediately pop up an error dialog stating that it's out of memory. Obviously, when looking at Task Manager we can see that memory is not an issue. InDesign will be using around 70mb of RAM, and the system will show 1.7GB free physical RAM.
Another problem is that it will go weeks, months, even maybe a year before happening again after re-building the machine its happening on. We have never been able to locate a root cause as to why this keeps happening. However, we have narrowed down that changes to the servers are not occurring at the time these issues start so we have ruled out configuration changes, system patches, etc.
One of the issues with the virtual machines that has seemed to have caused this, and was believed to be the issue until recently, was that the paging file would become corrupt. Thus rebuilding the VM was the only way to resolve. However, we have checked and double checked and the paging files on these servers are currently ok.
Obviously with such an old version of InDesign you can imagine that searching Google is quite difficult. Google likes to think we're asking about CS2, however, there have been a couple hits on 2.0.2.
These hits include information such as possible font corruption and deleting saved settings/defaults files. We have downloaded and used Microsoft's font validator on the fonts, and each have passed. We have also tried deleting the saved settings and defaults files numerious times, as well as deleting the font cache files so that InDesign will re-create them.
The paging files were also re-sized, turned off, moved to another local disk, etc. without any impact.
As this is the first time we've seen this impact multiple machines at the same time, and especially since its happening on both physical machines and virtual machines, we are trying to think of things which are common to these 4 servers. However, the only thing they really share are the mounted network shares. To get around this we've also tried opening our INDT's locally after copying them off the network, but the issue remains the same.
Another thing I've read is that the INDT itself may be corrupted, and to simply re-save the file. As I have a copy of InDesign locally to build these INDT's, this is also something I've tried but with no luck. The files don't seem to be corrupted. The same file which causes InDesign to crash on these four servers load perfectly fine on my local machine.
As we have escalated this to other key people here, our last suggestion was to either re-build the machines or contact Adobe for support. However, InDesign 2.0.2 is no longer a supported product due to its age so I am here - asking you, the community, for any assistance you can provide short of re-deploying these machines.
We would appreciate any assistance you can provide, and thank you for reading this.

Answer 1

Peter,
Thank you for the reply. In regards to...
"First, are you running InDesign Server, or trying to use a standalone ID
install as a server which is totally unsupported and probably not
allowed under the EULA? Nor is Windows Server a supported OS for
non-server versions of ID, so you're pretty much on your own as far as
what will work and what won't."
InDesign is setup, and launched, like any normal application on any other OS. We have a special user setup which runs the client process of our client/server model in the foreground, and it is that client process that then launches InDesign. This user is always logged in as a result.
"If, in fact, your templates are corrupt, in version 2.0.2 you're SOL as
far as being able to clean them up. Rebuild from scratch. The .inx
format was not introduced until version 3, and were you working in CS3
you could try Remove minor corruption by exporting but there would still be no guarantee of success."
This was one of the things I was trying to remember as I was typing. The .inx export, then re-saving as an .indt. However, as I build these templates locally, I have tried opening the file and re-saving it under a different file name. I then upload that new file and re-name back to the original name, although again, with no luck. I figure if the template is indeed corrupted that it's possible I'm just re-saving those issues even to a new file.
Re-Building from scratch is possible, however, this has happened with brand new templates as well. Again, this issue when it appears seems completely random. It chooses both new and old files alike, and those files appear to be just fine. It's just this time, for some reason, all four machines are doing it which has never happened before. Right now there are probably a few hundred templates which currently throw this error immediately upon loading (and all of the ones I've tried on my local desktop work just fine), and around the same amount that are exhibiting odd behavior with their output.
"Now on to the problem and solutions. You've already rejected the best
idea, which is to upgrade. The out of memory error might be file
corruption, or it might be realted to the use of .eps files which are
notorious for that sort of error. Reasaving in native formats is the
usual solution."
This is actually something I hadn't thought of or tried. I will re-save the EPS files as PDF's and give it ago with one, however, there are a couple things with that as well. One is that the Out of Memory error pops up on these machines as soon as I open the blank template. There are no graphics imported by default. So really it's just a plain document of whatever size, with a few boxes and text labels. Also, because we work in print and the fact these two applications have been used for so long, most of the artwork our child companies have provided us over the years are in this EPS format. There are a few thousand of them, and converting them all will take more time than it's worth for my company. They would not approve of my dedicating time to do that. New artwork we receive has been mostly in PDF as of late which does help in that regard, however.