Why do these programs massively page fault?

Some programs will not open; they will instead cause 200k pagefaults/sec while using up an entire CPU core. Simple Windows accessories seem to run just fine, however.

Affected programs include:

• Web Browsers
• MS Office
• Adobe Acrobat
• VLC

Working (unaffected) programs include:

• Windows Media Player
• GIMPPortable
• PuTTY
• Ping google.com

This is on a school computer ruing Windows 7 32-bit (6.1.7601 SP1 Build 7601). There is plenty of physical memory available (35% of 4GB in use). Restarting the computer had no effect.

Why would a program have a massive amount of page faults? What are possible causes and solutions of this?

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