title: What is 0x%08lx?
body: <p>I've been getting a lot of blue screens on my XP box at work recently. So many in fact that I downloaded debugging tools for windows(x86) and have been analyzing the crash dumps. So many in fact that I've changed the dumps to mini only or else I would probably end up tanking half a work day each week just waiting for the blue screen to finish recording the detailed crash log.</p>
  
  <p>Almost without exception every dump tells me that the cause of the blue screen is some kind of memory misallocation or misreference and the memory at 0x%08lx referenced 0x%08lx and could not be %s.</p>
  
  <p>Out of idle curiosity I put "0x%08lx" into Google and found that quite a few crash dumps include this bizarre message. Am I to take it that 0x%08lx is a place holder for something that should be meaningful? "%s" which is part of the concluding sentence "The memory could not be %s" definitely looks like it's missing a variable or something.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know the provenance of this message? Is it actually supposed to be useful and what is it <strong>supposed</strong> to look like?</p>
  
  <p>It's not a major thing I have always worked around it. It's just strange that so many people should see this in so many crash dumps and nobody ever says: "Oh the crash dump didn't complete that message properly it's supposed to read..."</p>
  
  <p>I'm just curious as to whether anyone knows the purpose of this strange error message artefact.</p>