Well, the problem we have as developers is that at one extreme, we have users who keep demanding more and more control over every aspect of of how Moodle behaves, and at the other extreme we have people demanding that we keep it simple.
Of course, both extremes are right, but it is just very difficult for us developers to satisfy both at once.
Oh, and there is a third important dimension, that makes things even harder: Security. Moodle sits there on the Internet, exposed to any malicious person who wants to try to hack it. We have to prevent that, while causing only minimal inconvenience to legitimate users.
In terms of 'easy to use', I think we can legitimately split users into three groups.
Students. I like what Niall Sclater said in relation to the OU's VLE: "If you can buy a book on Amazon, you should be able to study a course in [Moodle]." And I think we largely succeed on that score.
Teachers. This is a more diverse group, with more of the spread on the simplicity <-> control spectrum. I think we do OK here, with some notable exceptions, like the gradebook and some of the roles stuff. That was biassed too much towards to people who wanted control and lots of features, at the expense of people who wanted simplicity. We have got that message loud and clear from a number of sources, and we are improving matters for Moodle 2.0.
Administrators. This is by far the most diverse group, ranging from teams of professional system administrators in some universities and hosting companies, to teachers like yourself who just want to run their own Moodle. That is just an awesome range of skill-sets to have to cater to.
I will say that the individual teacher running their own private Moodle has always been an important part of the Moodle community. Indeed, if you go and look at the
system architecture document for Moodle, you will see that 'easy to install, learn and modify' is given high prominence. By the way, that architecture document confuses a lot of developers coming to Moodle for the first time, because that is not the sort of thing they expect to be told on a software architecture page.
Hmm. I seem to be doing everything other than answering your question here. I may get to the point eventually.
Another complexity is the number of other components that Moodle relies on. In a simple case like MS Word, running on your computer, there are just two pieces involved, the Word application, and the Windows operating system.
Moodle as an application relies on 4 other components. There is the PHP interpreter that executes the code; PHP itself runs in a web server; Moodle needs to connect to a
database that stores the data; and all that runs on an operating system.
And different people want to be able to choose different components there. They want to use either
Apache/
IIS/lighthttpd/... as a web server,
MySQL/
Postgres/MS
SQL server/
Oracle/... as a database. And they want to be able to run on Linux/Windows/Mac OS/BSD/.... It sometimes amazes me that it works at all
but most of the time it does.
The thing Fantastico does (or at least tries to do) is to set all 5 bits up for you and get them talking to each other.
I really am getting to the point now. I promise.
Now, at least 4 of those components (Operating system, Web server, PHP and Moodle) share responsible for ensuring that everything is secure.
One of the ways that a malicious people out there on the internet can damage your Moodle site is what is known as a 'Denial of service' attack. That is, they overload your system until it runs out of something, for example memory, and crashes.
So to combat this, PHP limits the amount of memory it uses to process any one request, according to rules that get handed to it by the operating system or web server. Now, when you are doing something that involves processing large amounts of data, Moodle does try to tell PHP "Hey, look, I am about to need lots of memory here, it's OK", but depending on the rules PHP has been told to obey, it may or may not be allowed to respond.
In particular, it looks like on your husband's server, PHP have been given a hard limit of about 45MB. In an ideal world, Fantastico might know that Moodle sometimes needs more than this, and not set things up that way. However ...
So, anyway, I hope all that rambling explains something about why problems like this happen. The bad news is that I don't know anything about Fantastico, or whoever hosts your husband's web server. So I don't know specifically how to change the PHP memory limit there. Hopefully someone here does, although a lot of cheaper web hosts do not let you raise it at all.
Oh, and see
Integrations#Fantastico 
