hi pierre
yes, that's possible: scribus needs to put in memory all the images and if can't fit them it will fail.
but if it's that single image that is not working and, after restarting scribus you get the same result, i fear that it's the image that is "wrong".
if you have the current stable version of scribus (1.4.x), the most common error that leads to this "message" is that you have a png image with a .jpg extension.
renaming the image as .png or saving the image as .jpg will solve the issue.
or the image has an error and you need to recreate it.
and are you really manually importing 150+ images into scribus just to create a pdf?
sometimes, learning a bit of script programming might be very helpful : - )
... or use the extras > picture browser in scribus to create and fill the pages in one go.
if you share your files we will probably be able to tell if you have hit a scribus issue or if you're "doing something wrong"...
ciao
a.l.e