What causes things like fatal exception errors?
When a program like Microsoft Word or Excel “crashes,” it means that something has gone seriously wrong during the program’s execution. The operating system often recognizes that there is a serious problem and kills off the offending application in a clean way. When it does this, the operating system will say something cryptic like “fatal exception error” (and often display a large collection of hexadecimal numbers that are totally useless to you, the user, but might be of some use to the original programmer). The other way for a program to crash is for it to take the operating system down with it, meaning that you have to reboot. Even though there is nothing you can do with the cryptic error messages, it might be nice to at least know what they mean! So let’s go through the three most common: • Fatal exception error – An application program like Microsoft Word is made up of many layers and components. There is the core operating system, an operating
