Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!cernvax!chx400!bernina!neptune!inf.ethz.ch!brandis From: brandis@inf.ethz.ch (Marc Brandis) Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms Subject: Re: what causes 'unrecoverable error'? Message-ID: <21616@neptune.inf.ethz.ch> Date: 18 Jan 91 13:57:23 GMT References: Sender: news@neptune.inf.ethz.ch Reply-To: brandis@inf.ethz.ch (Marc Brandis) Organization: Departement Informatik, ETH, Zurich Lines: 24 In article hp0p+@andrew.cmu.edu (Hokkun Pang) writes: >are there any usual causes of the 'unrecoverable error'? I ecounter this thing >so many times, what operation should I be cautious of? "Unrecoverable application error" is nothing but the general protection fault of the i286, i386 and i486. It is raised if a program does something that may hurt system integrity, like accessing memory outside of the blocks it has allocated, branching to invalid addresses, doing wrong pointer arithmetic or accessing devices directly that it is not allowed to access. There are lots of possible reasons, but all of them are program bugs. The bugs may occur both in real and in protected mode, but they are only detected in protected mode. Interesting how many professional programs have lots of such bugs in them. You can imagine that they were also there in the real mode times of Windows (1.0 - 2.13), but there they were not detected but rather modified the data or code belonging to other programs, causing all kind of mysterious problems later. -:) Marc-Michael Brandis Computer Systems Laboratory, ETH-Zentrum (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland email: brandis@inf.ethz.ch