Access violation in Process Tamer

[Centauri27]

I've been running Process Tamer for a couple of weeks and everything seemed to work normally. Then suddenly today all hell broke loose--I got the message:

Access violation at address 0045E9C8 in module 'ProcessTamerConfigurator.exe'. Read of address 74617285

Windows spit out one of these messages every half second---I was clicking 'OK' like mad to close them--but more would reappear like the deranged brooms in that Mickey Mouse cartoon (Fantasia?). Eventually I was able to bring up Task Manager and kill off the Process Tamer process. All the messages then disappeared and I was able to continue working normally, without having to reboot.

I had a variety of apps running at the time--too many to list--Outlook, Framemaker, etc. But I always have those apps running anyway. One slight clue might be that I had Microsoft Antispyware running a scan at the time and I had Process Tamer open so that I could see the CPU usage. Otherwise, my h/w is pretty standard: P4 3GHz, 1GB RAM, WinXP Pro, SP2.

Any ideas?

Thanks.
Carl Lum

[mouser]

there has to be some rare bug in the program somewhere, because we have received now a couple of these reports.  although im not sure if they were all from the gui tool.

i'd give my left arm if someone could reproduce this crash on a regular basis so that i could track it down..

at least you've given me a memory address i can try to look at..
the only thing i can think of is maybe the custom hash table system i use might be having some rare dengenerate condition.. if i get lucky then the error you gave me will shed some light, i'll report back.

[mouser]

btw - id like to move this post to the process tamer section where it belongs, once you see my reply.

secondly, i will offer a prize to anyone who can reliably cause this access violation crash to occur
(by reliably i mean you can recreate it on demand so that you can test any fixes i might want to try to correct the problem).

[mouser]

hehehe - just re-read the part about mickey mouse fantasia - gave me an idea.
i'm going to write another little test app that will create hundreds of processes, should be useful for stress testing process tamer and similar apps.

[Centauri27]

Mouser, I'm glad my Mickey Mouse comparison gave you a brain spark!    Those brooms were the first thing that popped into my head as I saw furiously replicating messages pop up....and like Mickey, I was madly trying to eradicate them as fast as I could, until I thought up a better idea to kill the process instead.

At least the errors didn't render my system unstable. But I haven't re-enabled Process Tamer yet either.

I'm new to your community and to your forums. I bounced around from the regular boards to the members-only one; I couldn't immediately see the different boards for each specific product. I'll look for your answers in the Process Tamer board, as soon as I find it....

Thanks.
Carl