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DLL that was not present in memory despite not being formally unloaded

99 pointsby ibobevtoday at 9:53 AM34 commentsview on HN

Comments

zabzonktoday at 12:27 PM

> The good news for the shell32 team is that they are off the hook; they are the victim. The bad news is that we don’t know who the culprit is.

The story of software development through the ages.

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rwmjtoday at 1:31 PM

What MSFT support policy do you need to have the legendary Raymond Chen take a look at it?

I say this because we've reported a bunch of Windows bugs (mainly running Windows under virtualization) and getting them to pay attention at all is an up-hill battle.

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1970-01-01today at 2:33 PM

>I asked for the 100 most recent crashes in that third party program and put them into a pivot table so I could see the distribution.

Always wondered if crash reporting is some kind of shady business. It's good to know it does, at minimum, do what it promises and give valuable crash data to MS.

kumarvvrtoday at 12:48 PM

I see posts like this, this deep dive into the call stacks and am always humbled and reminded of the limits of my knowledge about computers and programs.

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defrosttoday at 12:24 PM

That's some doggedly determined back tracing to uncover an unexpected heisenbug (loose meaning).

  So a total of 46% of the crashes were due to this rogue force-unload of a DLL. This is a case of bucket spray, where a single underlying cause generates a large number of different types of crashes.
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nopurposetoday at 2:09 PM

How big and important third-party vendor must be for Raymond Chen to dissect its coredumps?

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IChooseY0utoday at 2:56 PM

Windows COM is super weird and way over engineered.

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hackrmntoday at 2:56 PM

The fact that Raymond Chen is debugging these kind of issues, tells me Microsoft is short on staff that has his particular set of skills, handing him the hairiest issues from the annals of Windows. The new hires are probably all about .NET and JavaScript and what have you -- whatever Microsoft is about these days. I doubt it's C/C++. Chen is probably on standby and is paid handsomely as a de-facto VIP consultant. He is a legend, but he's becoming somewhat of a vintage developer.

antonvstoday at 4:33 PM

Feed the info and code to Claude, it'll diagnose and fix this. You're welcome, Microsoft.