Thank you for showing this information. It is much more useful to know what happens. Sorry in advance if my answer is a bit on the technical side, but the concepts involved can only be described this way IMO if we want to understand why we are reacting as I do here.
The following article is a high-quality resource to understand this problem:
As you can see, the actual cause of this particular fail fast exception (FAST_FAIL_FATAL_APP_EXIT) is a routine that is calling abort() to force the application to exit immediately 'for some urgent, unspecified reason'. There is no stack buffer overrun. From the debug analysis, the function that is triggering this exception is:
QCoreApplicationPrivate::qmljsDebugArgumentsString()
which belongs to the Qt library. This is a simple member function that returns a class data member by value. This member function does not take any arguments (it is what we know as accessor in the C++ programming jargon) and is probably being inlined, that is, not being actually invoked as a separate function but inserted directly in the code being executed. The QCoreApplicationPrivate class is a fundamental component of the Qt library. It is in the heart of any of the millions of existing Qt-based applications, including of course PixInsight. I dare take the high risk of saying that this code cannot have bugs, or otherwise the amount of applications that would be failing catastrophically everywhere would change the software industry.
What I am trying to explain here is that this is an abnormal situation that cannot happen under normal working conditions. Otherwise all of our Windows users (many thousands) would be experiencing basically the same issue and I probably couldn't be writing this. The first person in the world that is truly interested in solving these problems is me. But please understand that I cannot solve a problem that is not being caused by our code and cannot be reproduced under controlled, normal working conditions.
So what is the real cause of the problems that you are experiencing? It is a machine-specific cause that I cannot know and is beyond our control. I can try to make some guesswork, which leads to thinking things like:
The following article is a high-quality resource to understand this problem:
STATUS_STACK_BUFFER_OVERRUN doesn't mean that there was a stack buffer overrun - The Old New Thing
It used to mean that, but now it can mean other things, too.
devblogs.microsoft.com
As you can see, the actual cause of this particular fail fast exception (FAST_FAIL_FATAL_APP_EXIT) is a routine that is calling abort() to force the application to exit immediately 'for some urgent, unspecified reason'. There is no stack buffer overrun. From the debug analysis, the function that is triggering this exception is:
QCoreApplicationPrivate::qmljsDebugArgumentsString()
which belongs to the Qt library. This is a simple member function that returns a class data member by value. This member function does not take any arguments (it is what we know as accessor in the C++ programming jargon) and is probably being inlined, that is, not being actually invoked as a separate function but inserted directly in the code being executed. The QCoreApplicationPrivate class is a fundamental component of the Qt library. It is in the heart of any of the millions of existing Qt-based applications, including of course PixInsight. I dare take the high risk of saying that this code cannot have bugs, or otherwise the amount of applications that would be failing catastrophically everywhere would change the software industry.
What I am trying to explain here is that this is an abnormal situation that cannot happen under normal working conditions. Otherwise all of our Windows users (many thousands) would be experiencing basically the same issue and I probably couldn't be writing this. The first person in the world that is truly interested in solving these problems is me. But please understand that I cannot solve a problem that is not being caused by our code and cannot be reproduced under controlled, normal working conditions.
So what is the real cause of the problems that you are experiencing? It is a machine-specific cause that I cannot know and is beyond our control. I can try to make some guesswork, which leads to thinking things like:
- Wrong or corrupted system components, perhaps resulting from a wrong system update.
- Wrong or outdated device drivers.
- Registry corruption.
- An antivirus or firewall application messing with application data.
- Viruses and other malwares.