Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!percy!parsely!bucket!leonard
From: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: STACK OVERFLOW, SYSTEM HALTED
Message-ID: <1957@bucket.UUCP>
Date: 8 Feb 90 09:00:58 GMT
References: <672@tnosoes.UUCP> <100@qmsseq.imagen.com>
Organization: Rick's Home-Grown UNIX; Portland, OR.
Lines: 37

pipkins@qmsseq.imagen.com (Jeff Pipkins) writes:

>In article <672@tnosoes.UUCP> joep@tnosoes.UUCP (Joep Mathijssen) writes:
>>Can somebody help me with this error:
>>
>>    'STACK OVERFLOW, SYSTEM HALTED'.
>>

>I know this is going to be a little hard for those of us who know better
>to believe, but here goes.

>I have seen this symptom caused by a hardware problem.  This doesn't
>necessarily mean that it's caused by hardware in your specific case, but
>be aware that it is possible.

[description of problem involving odd AT clone and odd 286 chups deleted]

>Anyone else hear of this sort of thing?

We have several IBM PCs that are rather old and well used. Like about
100 of them...

A few of them will generate a stack overflow if you do a print-screen
from inside a Turbo Pascal menu program we use. We swapped everything
but the motherboard, even the CPU. The "bad" motherboards get the
error, the others are just fine.

It isn't a BIOS bug as the good machines and bad machines have the same
BIOS version. 

By playing with various things, we could get other nasties to happen when
we hit the printscreen key. But we never tracked it down.
-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short