Strange callstacks

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How many times have you been troubleshooting a dump or application, you look at the callstack and you see something that just doesn’t quite look right.  Chances are the problem is that you don’t have correct symbols.

For example, if you see something like this:

 Vswebdesign!DllCanUnloadNow+0xb02a0
Vswebdesign!DllCanUnloadNow+0xb8ef4
Vswebdesign!DllCanUnloadNow+0xb2203
Vswebdesign!DllCanUnloadNow+0xb248f
Vswebdesign!DllCanUnloadNow+0x2c406
Vswebdesign!DllCanUnloadNow+105a89
...

That usually is pointing to this problem.  You can see that the offsets for the functions are very large.  Also, the callstack is the same function repeated over and over.  And most applications probably don’t call DllCanUnloadNow.

If you get this problem, you can try to get the correct symbols, or just understand what you are seeing here and know that you aren’t seeing the correct functions.  For most things that concern you, you should be able to get the correct symbols so that you can properly resolve your callstacks.