Joe: this problem does NOT exist on Linux. It’s been many years since this problem was fixed in the Linux kernel. With Linux you can use at least 8GB of RAM (I believe it’s 16GB, but not sure) on a 32bit architecture. And no, applications don’t need to specifically support it or any of that crap. It just works right out of the box, without you having to mess with it.
So this IS in fact a Windows problem. Sure, it’s caused because of the architecture’s 32bitness, but other OS’s have worked around this for a long time.