You might try something other than Illustrator, Inkscape maybe? I run a professional graphic design studio - all I got is 1 GB or RAM on my best PC, yet I create all my maps and professional work on that system. Sometimes I even use my other PCs for some work and they have at best 512 MB RAM - yet I have no memory problems.

I understand what you did by bringing a large and probably high-res file into Illustrator which began to hog up memory - Photoshop eats tons of memory too in its operation.

One of the main reasons I like Xara Xtreme over Adobe products is the much more sensible way it handles memory usage.

I've never had a problem with only having 1 GB RAM for any project...