When customers call us with issues – in particular application or program failures, one of the first questions that we ask is, “What changed in the environment”. More often than not, the answer is, “Nothing”. In some cases, that may be true, however in a majority of cases, there has been some change of which the system administrator that we are working with is unaware. Tim Newton discussed some aspects of program crashes in his recent post, Access Violation? How dare you …, but let’s go ahead and recap some of them. The most common cause for an application crash is when a program tries to read or write memory that is not allocated for reading or writing by the application – a general protection fault.
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