How should you diagnose the error SEHException - External component has thrown an exception

Question

Whenever a user reports an error such as      System Runtime InteropServices SEHException - External component has thrown an exception    is there anything that I as a programmer can do to determine the cause    Scenario   One user  using a program my company wrote  has reported this error   This may or may not have been a one off error  They mentioned that in the last month  the computer has twice  stopped working   I have learnt from experience  not to take this description too literally  as it usually means that someone relating to the computer is not working as expected  They were unable to give me more details and I could not find any logged errors  Hence it may or may not have been this error   From the stack-trace  the actual error was when constructing a class which does not directly call any interop code  but perhaps complicated by the fact that the object may be part of a list that is databound to a DevExpress Grid   The error was  caught  by an unhandled exception routine which normally will close down the program  but has an option to ignore and continue  If they opted to ignore the error  then the program continued working but the error re-occurred when this routine was next run  However it did not occur again after closing and restarting our application    The computer in question did not seem to be stressed out  It is running Vista Business  has 2GB of memory and according to Task Manager was only using about half of that with our application just about 200Mb    There is one other piece of information that may or may not be relevant  Another section of the same program uses a third party component which is effectively a dotnet wrapper around a native dll and this component does have a known issue where very occasionally  you get a      Attempted to read or write protected memory  This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt    The component makers say that this has been fixed in the latest version of their component which we are using in-house  but this has not been given to the customer yet   Given that the consequences of the error are low  no work is lost and restarting the program and getting back to where they were only takes a minute at most  and given that the customer will shortly be getting a new version  with the updated third-party component   I can obviously cross my fingers and hope the error won t occur again    But is there anything more I can do

User · Accepted Answer

Yes   This error is a structured exception that wasn t mapped into a  NET error   It s probably your DataGrid mapping throwing a native exception that was uncaught   You can tell what exception is occurring by looking at the ExternalException ErrorCode property   I d check your stack trace  and if it s tied to the DevExpress grid  report the problem to them

User · Answer

I have come across this error when the app resides on a network share  and the device  laptop  tablet       becomes disconnected from the network while the app is in use  In my case  it was due to a Surface tablet going out of wireless range   No problems after installing a better WAP

User · Answer

Just another information    Had that problem today on a Windows 2012 R2 x64 TS system where the application was started from a unc network path  The issue occured for one application for all terminal server users   Executing the application locally worked without problems  After a reboot it started working again - the SEHException s thrown had been Constructor init and TargetInvocationException

User · Answer

if you are having a problem as describe in this post   asp net mvc debugger throwing SEHException  then the solution is   if you have any application from Trusteer  like rapport or anything   just uninstall and reboot your system  it ll work fine     found this solution here    http   forums asp net t 1704958 aspx 8 10 Re SEHException thrown when I run the application

User · Answer

My machine configurations    Operating System   Windows 10 Version 1703  x64   I faced this error while debugging my C   Net project in Visual Studio 2017 Community edition  I was calling a native method by performing p invoke on a C   assembly loaded at run-time  I encountered the very same error reported by OP   I realized that Visual Studio was launched with a user account which was not an administrator on the machine  Then I relaunched Visual Studio under a different user account which was an administrator on the machine  That s all  My problem got resolved and I didn t face the issue again   One thing to note is that the method which was being invoked on C   assembly was supposed to write few things in registry  I didn t go debugging the C   code to do some RCA but I see a possibility that the whole thing was failing as administrative privileges are required to write registry in Windows 10 operating system  So earlier when Visual Studio was running under a user account which didn t have administrative privileges on the machine  then the native calls were failing

User · Answer

I got this error while running unit tests on inmemory caching I was setting up  It flooded the cache  After invalidating the cache and restarting the VM  it worked fine

User · Answer

The component makers say that this has been fixed in the latest version of their component which we are using in-house  but this has been given to the customer yet    Ask the component maker how to test whether the problem that the customer is getting is the problem which they say they ve fixed in their latest version  without before deploying their latest version to the customer

User · Answer

I had a similar problem with an SEHException that was thrown when my program first used a native dll wrapper  Turned out that the native DLL for that wrapper was missing  The exception was in no way helpful in solving this  What did help in the end was running procmon in the background and checking if there were any errors when loading all the necessary DLLs

[c#] How should you diagnose the error SEHException - External component has thrown an exception

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