Application Crashes With "Internal Error In The .NET Runtime"

Question

We have an application written against .NET 4.0 which over the weekend crashed, putting the following message into the event log:

Application: PnrRetrieverService.exe Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an internal error in the .NET Runtime at IP 791F9AAA (79140000) with exit code 80131506.

This is on a Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition box. Googling this error hasn't turned up anything pertinent. For example, this isn't occurring in VS Studio, but instead on a production box; when the service was eventually restarted, it experienced no further problems.

How does one go about diagnosing a bug in the .NET Runtime?

Answer 1

with exit code 80131506

That's a nasty one, ExecutionEngineException. Starting with .NET 4.0, this exception immediately terminates the program. The generic cause is corruption of the state of the garbage collected heap. Which in turn is invariably caused by unmanaged code. The exact location in code at which this exception is raised isn't helpful, the corruption usually occurred well before the damage is detected.

Finding the exact cause for this is going to be difficult. Review any unmanaged code your service might be using. Suspect environmental problems if there is no obvious candidate, misbehaving malware scanners are notorious. If it repeats very poorly then suspect hardware problems like soft RAM errors.