I never had a problem playing it but now i get an error, "Needed to allocate at least 4096.0 MB to load images". I have 8gb ram and i dont run anything else besides cod waw. Any ideas?

Turn off specular mapping in your graphics options for CoDWaW, that will prevent the specular map images from loading into RAM and clear the error. The error happens because the mapper put a specular map file into the map that exceeds the maximum filesize for the engine.