DLL that was not present in memory despite not being formally unloaded
ibobev
140 points
43 comments
June 28, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (10 comments)
defrost
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.
zabzonk
> 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.
masfuerte
Part two: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260626-00/?p=11...
kumarvvr
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.
rwmj
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.
nopurpose
How big and important third-party vendor must be for Raymond Chen to dissect its coredumps?
1970-01-01
>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.
hackrmn
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.
IChooseY0u
Windows COM is super weird and way over engineered.
antonvs
Feed the info and code to Claude, it'll diagnose and fix this. You're welcome, Microsoft.