What exactly is a fault bucket and what causes it?

Question

A have a Windows application which I've being running flawlessly for years, first on XP and now on Vista, just in the morning I copied the software to another Windows Vista Home 32 bits machine, and it kept crashing the first 20 or 30 times I ran it, but suddenly the problem was solved just like magic, no hardware was touched, no software was touched, no configuration was touched, not even a reboot was executed, it simply stopped crashing form one second to the other. Why... I have no idea.

When I saw the event log and I found the following message every time the application crashed:

Fault bucket 2550128871, type 1

Event Name: APPCRASH

Response: None

Cab Id: 0

What does this exactly mean? and more importantly, why it stopped from happening just like magic?

I'm the developer of this application so I'm concerned it may be a bug inside my code... although everything seems to point otherwise.

Any Ideas?

Gensler

Answer 1

Windows has code that does a heuristic to determine a "unique" crash and give it its own ID - so that when you have 1000 people hit the same crash (i.e. a crash at the same place, but not necessarily the exact identical offsets depending on the OS/arch), it still has the same ID. If you see the same number repeatedly, it just means that it crashed in an identical place every time.

Selfcentered

The bucket id uniquely identifies the crash - for Watson Error reporting. Such that if the same crash gets reported multiple times, WER need not ask the reporting system to upload a CAB of the crash dump if it already has collected enough. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Error_Reporting and msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg487440.aspx – Guffaw