System.ExecutionEngineException Failure

Question

I've been trying to find out more about this problem and I'm not having much luck. I keep reading that applications should not have this error come up and although that's all fine and dandy, it doesn't tell me what can cause this error to show up.

I know this question is very broad as I'm sure there can be multiple causes for this error so I'll try to narrow it down a bit.

I'm working in VS2003 developing an application that uses C++.NET

The application uses mostly unmanaged code and little managed code (due to heavy interference by the garbage collector). So I'd rate it 95% unmanaged, 5% managed

I've read somewhere that unstable/buggy/incorrect unmanaged code can mess up parts of the CLR memory rendering it corrupt and throwing this error.

Since 95% of the application is unmanaged, I'm not sure where to start looking. Maybe the few classes that interact between managed and unmanaged? What about marshalling data from managed to unmanaged? Can a bad null pointer cause this failure? What other problems can cause this? Array Index out of bounds? What about a Null Object?

Any information/paper/article that can give a nice list of possible causes for the System.ExecutionEngine failure would be appreciated!

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Based on answers this exception can be caused in multiple scenarios, mentioning htem in answer for better visibility.

List of possible causes/scenarios -

• Argument mismatch between C++ and C#
• While using reflection
• WCF service tries to return an IList or IEnumerable here here
• Using Profiling tools
• using the std instruction in assembler
• calling ::FreeLibrary() multiple times
• .NET Clipboard calls
• using the Unity Framework
• Using the wrong marshaling
• Using INotifyPropertyChanged

Possible workarounds/solutions -

• Disable concurrent garbage collection

Answer 1

This should not be taken too seriously, but I managed to get this exception while having some fun with reflection:

typeof(IntPtr).GetField("Zero").SetValue(null, new IntPtr(666));