Q150314 What Are Fatal Exception Errors.

Summary

When you attempt to shut down your system or start Windows application (or even start Windows itself) you may encounter error such as:

“A fatal exception XY has occurred at xxxx:xxxxxxxx”

Fatal exception errors occur in the following situations:

> Access to an illegal instruction has occurred

> Invalid data or code has been accessed

> The privilege level of a certain operation is invalid

If any of the above have occurred it is likely that your system will need to be rebooted or shut down – however this depends on the seriousness of the error.

In the first error message shown above, XY means the ‘processor exception from 00 to 0F’. The’ xxxx:xxxxxxxx’ represents the enhanced instruction pointer to the code segment; the 32-bit address is where the exception occurred. Windows itself does not cause this error but it does have the exception-handling routine for this particular processor exception.