Can an application blue-screen Windows 2000/XP?



Our application is being suspected of causing Windows instability. The
machines blue-screen seemingly at random, dump their memory, then reboot.
There were 2 occurrences. I think one was on a Win 2000, another on an XP
machine (to be confirmed, definitely not Windows 9x though). The application
is a user-mode application, not a kernel-mode driver nor a service. It is
written in C++ (Borland compiler) and uses merely the Windows API, not MFC
nor .NET. Third-party DLLs only include Oracle SQL*Net client software
9.2.0.4, which is the networking software to connect to Oracle databases,
provided by Oracle.

My question is: Is this even possible or must the blame lie somewhere else?
I was under the impression that, while applications might generate a "Dr.
Watson" or "Send / Don't Send error report to Microsoft" error, they cannot
blue-screen the whole PC under 2000/XP. It would take something lower-level,
for example a buggy kernel-mode driver, to accomplish the latter. Is this
correct or is it possible for an application to blue-screen the whole PC
under those operating systems? If so, do you know any examples that might
cause this? For example could running out of stack / memory / other Windows
resources cause this? Again, to my knowledge, the answer is "no". I've seen
applications disappear without even so much as an error because of those
type of resource problems. I've never seen an application blue-screen a
machine under 2000/XP and thought the NT architecture prevents this
possibility altogether. Would anyone like to set me straight?


.



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