Delphi – What do I do when the program crashes with exception 0xc0000005 at address 0

For Linux and I believe Mac OS X, if you're using gcc, or any compiler that uses glibc, you can use the backtrace() functions in execinfo.h to print a stacktrace and exit gracefully when you get a segmentation fault. Documentation can be found in the libc manual.

Here's an example program that installs a SIGSEGV handler and prints a stacktrace to stderr when it segfaults. The baz() function here causes the segfault that triggers the handler:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <execinfo.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>


void handler(int sig) {
  void *array[10];
  size_t size;

  // get void*'s for all entries on the stack
  size = backtrace(array, 10);

  // print out all the frames to stderr
  fprintf(stderr, "Error: signal %d:\n", sig);
  backtrace_symbols_fd(array, size, STDERR_FILENO);
  exit(1);
}

void baz() {
 int *foo = (int*)-1; // make a bad pointer
  printf("%d\n", *foo);       // causes segfault
}

void bar() { baz(); }
void foo() { bar(); }


int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  signal(SIGSEGV, handler);   // install our handler
  foo(); // this will call foo, bar, and baz.  baz segfaults.
}

Compiling with -g -rdynamic gets you symbol info in your output, which glibc can use to make a nice stacktrace:

$ gcc -g -rdynamic ./test.c -o test

Executing this gets you this output:

$ ./test
Error: signal 11:
./test(handler+0x19)[0x400911]
/lib64/tls/libc.so.6[0x3a9b92e380]
./test(baz+0x14)[0x400962]
./test(bar+0xe)[0x400983]
./test(foo+0xe)[0x400993]
./test(main+0x28)[0x4009bd]
/lib64/tls/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xdb)[0x3a9b91c4bb]
./test[0x40086a]

This shows the load module, offset, and function that each frame in the stack came from. Here you can see the signal handler on top of the stack, and the libc functions before main in addition to main, foo, bar, and baz.

0x0eedfade could be an unhandled Delphi exception propagated outside of a Delphi process. If the problem only exists when linking in the Dialogs unit it's possible that its initialization, or initialization of any unit it depends on, raises an exception which is not handled and escapes out of your Delphi process.

It could be related to the fact that a service runs in an isolated session (as described in this document) and doesn't have access to the Windows UI subsystem (station, desktop, windows) anymore. In other words, forget interactive services.