I run a similiar group of programs on most of my computers, but then most of them are running either Win2000 or WinXP. Those four might not be a problem with a little extra memory (won't help your "system resources" Win9x issues, but will improve performance, which might get unacceptable if the machine runs for more than a day or two without a shutdown or restart --- [restarting the computer once a day can help a Win9x machine that carries a heavy load, since many programs from that era were sloppy about restoring resources on exit])
If you haven't visited there before, you can check out the whole Win9x resource usage situation from pacs-portal's excellent Startup Tips pages -
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_index.htm . . . There's another excellent series of articles at the
http://www.aumha.org site, but I don't have the specific page link handy.
If the virus definitions subscription has run out for the Norton 2003, you may want to consider trying rjfvillarosa's recommendation of AVG, which has a free-for-personal-use edition available at its website
http://www.grisoft.com . . . if the virus definitions have been out-of-date for a while, you want to get something up to date as soon as you can. The online scan will let you know if an infection is already present (and will clean it if possible), while if Norton is out-of-date it may well miss it.
I still haven't found any identification for the "Chris...cleaner" background process: do you know for sure what program that is?
Do you connect via broadband or dial-up? And are you on a local network? If so, definitely keep a firewall running, and consider the hardware firewall idea.
Did the low-memory error messages disappear for now?
(Hope so!)
. . . Gary
[Late edit - Hmmm, haven't been to the Grisoft website lately, but I just looked over there, and it seems they are coming out with a new version. The older AVG's support will be discontinued Dec.31, 2004 ... I haven't heard yet how much overhead the newer version has. Norton 2003 is easier on Win98 than the 2004 version (at least in the cases I've seen) - it's an option simply to re-subscribe for definitions for the Norton, too. ]