Stefan,
As promised I gave 3ds a workout with 96 mb installed in our Asus system.
Worked fine, no Pharlap complaints. Rendered a rather large mesh (150.000
triangles) and rendered it to full dia-resolution (4096*3072). 3DS used mem was
about 89 mb and no swapping needed!. Took only two hours to render actually.
We have the same board and the same 3DS some there must be some other factor
involved in your system. Do you use some sort of memory manager other than
himem ?