Silent crash in Windows -- what can cause it?

Bradley Smith digitalmars-com at baysmith.com
Fri Jan 11 23:25:55 PST 2008


Don Clugston wrote:
> I have a multi-threaded Windows app. Occasionally, it crashes silently: 
> the GUI abruptly disappears, no "blue screen of death" or equivalent. 
> Some of the worker threads (created in DLLs) continue to run, and the 
> DLLs remain loaded.
> This is not a D issue in this case (it's a C++ app), yet I've seen this 
> behaviour in D in the past.
> I know that uncaught Windows Structured Exceptions can cause this type 
> of crash; calling exit(1) does the same thing.
> Is there anything else which can do this?
> 
> I've been fighting this bug for days; I've never had so much trouble 
> with a bug before. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.


I've seen silent crashes in Windows that were stack overflow errors 
caused by infinite looping of a series of function calls. However, it 
was not a multi-threaded app, and it was easy to see the problem when 
run through the debugger.



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