More Chrome Grief

More Google Chrome browser grief.  I merely refreshed a Yahoo mail page and Google Chrome crashed.  Was it Yahoo's fault or Google's?  Who knows.  This is what the message said:

Unhandled exception at 0x77de15de in chrome.exe: 0xC0000374: A heap has been corrupted.

Then it asked me if I wanted to debug it.  Since I have a debugger on board, I said sure.  Here is what the trail looks like:

77DE15B3  nop              
77DE15B4  mov         eax,12Eh 
77DE15B9  xor         ecx,ecx 
77DE15BB  lea         edx,[esp+4] 
77DE15BF  call        dword ptr fs:[0C0h] 
77DE15C6  add         esp,4 
77DE15C9  ret         18h  
77DE15CC  mov         eax,12Fh 
77DE15D1  xor         ecx,ecx 
77DE15D3  lea         edx,[esp+4] 
77DE15D7  call        dword ptr fs:[0C0h] 
77DE15DE  add         esp,4 

And it crapped out at 77DE15DE.  Here it is adding esp a stack pointer to 4.  A corrupted heap means several things.  One could be that the stack pointer has been deallocated, or destroyed, or not set.  Whatever the cancer in the stack was, it caused the whole thing to blow up.

The ironic thing is that the exception was not handled.  This means that there was no accounting for error in the code.  At a high level, this is sloppy coding.  As previously iterated, Chrome is starting to lose its shine.  It turns out that the Google programming machine is not infallible as they like to believe.

Lately Skype is a piece of Crap -- Skype virus???

I am having serious issues with Skype. I travel back and forth between the tropics, and I have an XP desktop in the tropics. Until a day before yesterday (June 14, 2011), the platform was quite stable. I was using Skype with a cheap webcam with no issues.

Then all of a sudden, the machine would crash. It would start to reboot in black DOS mode, and sometimes just hang until I had to remove the power cord. After repeated tries, I got it to boot in Safe Mode with networking. It still crashed at startup. I once got a blue screen.

I let the computer sit for a few hours and it started. I downloaded xrepairpro.exe and regressed the machine to a stable version of two weeks ago. Everything worked fine. The machine was stable.

Then overnight, an automatic updater must have fired. Skype crashed the machine again after it working perfectly the day before. When the machine rebooted xrepairpro was gone from the machine. Mind you it was a trial version but the weirdness persists.

I am wondering if there is such a thing as a Skype virus. I will download an earlier version of Skype, turn off automatic updater and report back. Please leave a comment if you know what is going on.