What exactly is a fault bucket and what causes it?

What exactly is a fault bucket and what causes it?

• A have a Windows application which I've being running flawlessly for years, first on XP and now on Vista, just in the morning I copied the software to another Windows Vista Home 32 bits machine, and it kept crashing the first 20 or 30 times I ran it, but suddenly the problem was solved just like magic, no hardware was touched, no software was touched, no configuration was touched, not even a reboot was executed, it simply stopped crashing form one second to the other. Why... I have no idea. When I saw the event log and I found the following message every time the application crashed: Fault bucket 2550128871, type 1 Event Name: APPCRASH Response: None Cab Id: 0 What does this exactly mean? and more importantly, why it stopped from happening just like magic? I'm the developer of this application so I'm concerned it may be a bug inside my code... although everything seems to point otherwise. Any Ideas?

• Answer:

  Windows has code that does a heuristic to determine a "unique" crash and give it its own ID - so that when you have 1000 people hit the same crash (i.e. a crash at the same place, but not necessarily the exact identical offsets depending on the OS/arch), it still has the same ID. If you see the same number repeatedly, it just means that it crashed in an identical place every time.