All worlds will come down on 9/7/2007 at 8:00am CDT for approximately 10 minutes to apply hotfix 91c.

Frequent readers may have noticed me describing a "mysterious exit" problem that we've been having with the server for the past six months. We've finally discovered what the cause of the problem is. This hotfix ensures that this kind of exit will save all character data and will be logged so we can pinpoint the exact issue.

If you're a nerd like me, you may be interested in more details. Read on, nerdy ones!

The symptom of the problem is the dreaded runtime error R6025. Microsoft's Description of the Error! We've installed a handler for this kind of runtime error (using _set_purecall_handler) and now log the call stack when it happens as well as ensuring that our normal server shutdown process occurs. The default behavior is to print some useless error to STDERR and then forcibly terminate the application.

That's it!

steve