"You said you had the problem while using Digital Image Pro. Image editing will use LARGE amounts of memory.
I have never used Digital Image Pro, does it have a setting for amount of disk cache to use? I've played with still images that were swapping over 5 gigs during image manipulation.

You also did not say ( or did I miss that somewhere ) how much memory your "454 big block chev" has.

If you are going to do a lot of image editing you should install as much memory as you can and make sure your hard drives have enough room for the programs ( and the OS ) swap files."
Exactly. Anytime you plan to use digital editing alot, your best bet is to make a huge ass pagefile on a non-system drive (your fastest drive if possible). Photoshop will reccomend this when you install it. Photo editing programs will load the entire image into VM if possible to avoid having to process the image in pieces. Any time you rotate,filter,crop etc, its going to chew up serious memory. This is normal for this kind of app its just one of those memory intensive things. The program itself may have its own pagefile you may be able to adjust as well if the problem persists. I reccomend running your image apps without any other apps to avoid straining your memory. As far as a long term effect I dont think it will harm your machine in the slightest it just uses poop loads of memory for digital editing, especially with high quality images.

-Maestr0