Inconsistent crashes at random places in an application on Windows 10

I have been developing an application for many years and it has been working well on Windows 10 compiled with Open Watcom. All it does is read a text file and produce a number of html files. Within the past months it has been crashing at random times about 10-20% of the time with the same input data. When it’s compiled by gcc on the Mac/OS X, it works fine and does not crash on the Mac. I backed off on mnay of the recent changes I made to the code but do not wish to undo my work unnecessarily. Debuggers and dignostic output do not seem useful as the results of the crashes seem random and inconsistent. I can run the same input data several times and get failures in different places with different crash maps produced that all start something like the following:

The instruction at 0x0042e973 referenced memory at 0x006e8f2d.
The memory could not be read.
Exception fielded by 0x0042dcb0
EAX=0x00000001 EBX=0xffffff43 ECX=0x0042002b EDX=0x00458f2d

Any help to diagnose this problem will be appreciated.

In such a case, the most useful thing is a memory dump or even a crash dump, which contains the call stack of the thing the computer was trying to do when it crashed.

There are two ways ahead for this:

• Either you alter your application in such a way that, when it crashes, a crash or memory dump is created automatically.
• Either the user of the application configures his system in such a way that an application, which crashes, causes a crash dump or memory dump to be created.

Choose wisely :-)