title: Analyzing a crash in Windows: what does the error message tell us?
body: <p>A small utility of mine that I made for personal use (written in C++) crashed randomly yesterday (I've used it roughly 100+ hours with no issues so far) and while I don't normally do this, I was feeling a bit adventurous and wanted to try and learn more about the problem. I decided to go into the Event Viewer and see what Windows had logged about the crash:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Faulting application StraightToM.exe, version 0.0.0.0, time stamp 0x4a873d19 
  Faulting module name : StraightToM.exe, version 0.0.0.0, time stamp 0x4a873d19
  Exception code : 0xc0000005
  Fault offset : 0x0002d160,
  Faulting process id: 0x17b4
  Faulting application start time: time 0x01ca238d9e6b48b9.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My question is, what do each of these things mean, and how would I use these to debug my program? Here's what I know so far: exception code describes the error, and 0xc0000005 is a memory access violation (tried to access memory it didn't own). I'm specifically interested in knowing more about the following:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What does the fault offset mean? Does that represent the location in the file where the error occured, or does it mean the assembly 'line' where the error occured? Knowing the fault offset, how would I use a program like OllyDbg to find the corresponding assembly code that caused the error? Or -- even better -- would it be possible to (easily) determine what line of code in the C++ source caused this error?</li>
  <li>It's obvious that the time stamp corresponds to the 32-bit UNIX time at the time of the crash, but what does the 64-bit application start time mean? Why would it be 64-bits if the time stamp is 32?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Note that I'm primarily a C++ programmer, so while I know something about assembly, my knowledge of it is very limited. Additionally, this really isn't a serious problem that needs fixing (and is also not easily reproduced, given the nature of the program), I'm just using this more as an excuse to learn more about what these error messages mean. Most of the information about these crash logs that I've found online are usually aimed at the end-user, so they haven't helped me (as the programmer) very much.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance</p>