IE Crashes: c00000fd (stack overflow)

[Tim]

Just switched ISP's from cable to DSL (SBC-Yahoo). The
SBC Yahoo self installer hung repeatedly, and eventually
it took tech support to work around that. Somewhere during
that process IE6 broke.
After resetting IE as my default browser I'd dbl click a
link and I'd get a short hourglass, then nothing. Same for
launching it from quicklaunch and even trying the IE icon
on the desktop. Go directly to the executable, same thing.
Now here's the fun part, try to run Search or Control
Panel from the start menu and I have a serious crash,
windows writes a log file indicating a stack overflow ,
everything refreshes and the system tray is missing half
of its processes. You can dbl click My Computer and that
works OK(my default is Explore, not Open). From there can
Explore another folder or even Control Panel from there
but if you try to right click and OPEN a folder it
crashes. So right now I'm stuck with SBC's dorky YBrowser,
which I hate, and cannot do many things that apparently
require IE (like Search)

Here's what I've done so far one or more times, none have
had any affect. (my XP boot has no problems)
- Repair IE6 from add/remove programs
- Revert to IE5.5 from add/remove programs
- Reinstall the IE6 SP1
- Run SFC
- Reinstall W2K on top of itself and reload all of the
SP's and patches

Each time a Dr Watson log is written it always indicates a
stack overflow, except for the time and pid its always
this... and of course a lot more;

Application exception occurred:
App: explorer.exe (pid=1852)
When: 9/13/2003 @ 20:04:26.203
Exception number: c00000fd (stack overflow)

I'm utterly frustrated. Any and all suggestions are
appreciated.
Tim

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

Each time a Dr Watson log is written it always indicates a

stack overflow, except for the time and pid its always
this... and of course a lot more;

Tim,

The most important information is the crashing module and version.
You can get that from several sources: Event Viewer, drwtsn32,
or, if you have the Error Reporting Tool enabled and are getting
the Send/Don't Send window, click on the <click here> link there
and capture the Error Signature.

<title>276550 - Description and Availability of Internet Explorer Error Reporting Tool</title>


However, it can also help to know the caller of the module where
the crash occurs and the only way to find that is to extract the
Stack Back Trace from the drwtsn32.log dump.

Assuming the last dump is the one you are interested in and your
Windows version is English open drwtsn32.log in Notepad,
scroll to the bottom and do a find up for FAULT ->
(That prefixes is the crash address and interpreted instruction.)
Page ahead to the section titled Stack Back Trace and extract
the entire section. In the right-hand column you can see module name
and entrypoint information which will give you clues about your crash.

Unfortunately, it seems that your OS drwtsn32 doesn't do as good a job
of identifying modules as the other NTx versions do. So it may help to
turn on Symbol Table dumping too. That significantly enlarges the size
of a dump and would make it undesirable to post it but it could make it
more usable for you.


HTH

Robert Aldwinckle