Yep. PAE doesn't allow for any single program to have any more than the roughly 3 GB because the virtual memory of every program still is a 32 bit address space.
Yeah I remember when PAE first came about on the PPRO. It was designed specifically for applications to extend the system.
oracle, mssql, etc had weird extended windowed memory versions for huge ppro systems (Remember this is back in 1996). All the horrors of working with XMS/EMS type memory with the added joy of windows. How could you lose?
