C++ Program hangs on ntdll.dll execution

Question

When I try to run my program it never enters the main() function, but just hangs. Some how though, my program is throwing an exception in one of my classes as the first call in the stack after numerous calls to ntdll.dll. The exception seems to be the factor that is causing my program to hang with a "< bad ptr >". I am unable to trigger any breakpoints I set though, making it harder to find where the problem originates.

Answer 1

You need to figure out which system call you made that caused the crash. Normally this kind of thing is the result of passing garbage into some windows API.

Use a debugger and look at the call stack. The last entry that is inside your code is likely to be the cause of the problem. It probably has some bad data that is it not handling correctly.

Answer 2

you might get more information with a debug build

Answer 3

This sounds like you are using global objects/singletons. If any of these depend on each other you are in trouble. I would look for all your globals and put a break point in the contructor of each. It sounds like the contructor for one global is using another global but the second has not been contructed yet.

Finally if this is not the cause, and your application is loading 3rd party dlls they might be clashing. I remember once orbix and ms message queue dlls classing in one was loaded before the other, everything worked if they were loaded the other way around. In the end to find this I removed every thing till I was just left with an empty main and then started adding things one by one until I found the problem.