[R] R crashes due to stats.dll

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12-03-17 8:15 PM, Ted Stankowich wrote:
> Hello!
> I've been running a looped AIC analysis using several modules including
> ape, nlme, and MuMIn, and during one particularly long analysis, R (ver
> 2.14.12) crashes several minutes into the routine with the simple
> message "R for windows GUI front-end has stopped working".  I'm using a
> brand new laptop with Windows 7, i7 processor, 8GB RAM.  I've tried it
> on both the 64 bit and 32 bit versions of R.  Using the 64 bit version,
> the analysis makes it through a few iterations before it crashes (maybe
> about 20-25 min into the test).
>
> The event viewer provides this information every time it crashes:
> Faulting application name: Rgui.exe, version: 2.142.58522.0, time stamp:
> 0x4f4e7196
> Faulting module name: stats.dll, version: 2.142.58522.0, time stamp:
> 0x4f4e72c0
> Exception code: 0xc0000005
>
> Does anyone have any idea what might be going wrong here?

Most likely some function is writing to memory it doesn't own.  This 
might be a bug in the stats package, but I would guess it is much more 
likely to be a bug in one of the other packages you used, and stats is 
crashing when it comes across the damage.

Debugging this sort of thing is quite hard in Windows:  you need to 
build R with debugging information and run it under a compatible version 
of a debugger (e.g. gdb).  I'd recommend trying the code on a Linux or 
MacOS system, where you will still need to make sure the debugger is 
installed, but you tend to get more informative messages from it.

Duncan Murdoch