Have a fairly new Dell Inspiron 537S tower, about a year old. IE 8. Windows XP (I paid extra not to have Vista loaded). Have CA Security software downloaded (comes free with RoadRunner).
I keep getting “Stack Overflow” errors when I try to load certain webpages. For instance, every time I go to the Alamo rental car page from Costco.com, I get constant 104 errors. When I try to steam some videos on YouTube, I get the same error.
I’m also have issues when I try to click on the links from the Costco Alamo page or from my tennis website. For instance, from the Costco page, I’ll click on the “book now” link and it does…nothing. Ditto if I try to drill down to the individual player’s scores on the tennis website, which you can do by double clicking. Once again, nothing happens. I am able to right click and open up in a New Window, but it works fine on other computers.
Now, if I disable my Firewall, I can click on things, so I’m not sure if it’s a Firewall problem, an IE problem, or what. But I still get the Stack Overflow error.
A “stack” in computer terms is a type of memory. Basically, you can picture it like a bunch of trays being stacked up. When a computer program calls a subroutine, it typically puts a bunch of stuff up on its stack, like shoving a bunch of trays onto the pile. The last stuff on the stack is the first to come back off of it. When the subroutine is done, it is supposed to clear all of its stuff off of the stack so that the stack is back where it started before the subroutine got called.
A stack overflow means basically the computer ran out of trays. This is kind of a generic error, so it can sometimes be difficult to track down. Anything that throws internet explorer into an infinite loop is going to run its stack out of space. For example, if there’s a bug in an error handling routine, that bug is going to trigger the error routine to be called. Then it encounters the bug in the error routine, which causes the error routine to be called again, and again it encounters the bug, over and over. Each time the error routine is called, more stuff gets pushed up onto the stack and eventually IE runs out of stack space. This is just one of many ways that you can run out of stack space, though.
The hard part is figuring out what is causing IE to have this problem. The first thing I would probably do is go to Microsoft and download the latest version of IE. You might have an older version that has some sort of bug in it. The next thing would be to disable any extensions you have added to IE. After that maybe try updating your java run-time environment. It could be a java bug that is giving IE a fit.
I’ve read that this can also help, sometimes:
Open Internet Explorer
Click on Tools
Click Internet Options
Click the Advanced tab
Locate the Reset Internet Explorer Settings heading
Click the Reset button
Click Ok
Restart Internet Explorer
Personally I’d recommend switching to some other browser like firefox or opera, but I don’t want to start a browser war here.
I’m not sure it’s IE itself that is producing a stack overflow: unless I’m much mistaken, I don’t think that the error would be identified as a “stack overflow” to the user in that case – Internet Explorer would just crash completely with the standard “this program has stopped working” message.
However, Internet Explorer will alert you to a stack overflow in the scripting engine: if some JavaScript code on a web page you’re viewing gets stuck in an infinite recursion of the sort engineer_comp_geek mentioned, IE will abort the script and display a message box that says “Stack overflow at line: <number>”. Is this what you’re seeing?
Most often, when this happens it is because of faulty coding at the other end of the pipe: whoever wrote the web page screwed up. But if this is only happening when you view it on one computer (and not a different computer also running IE8), then I’m not sure what it could be unless an extension you have is somehow interfering with things. So, engineer_comp_geek’s suggestions are probably good ones.
How much memory do you have? Stacks tend to hit the heap when they don’t have enough room to grow properly.
Adding a gig or two could help matters immensely.
Not if it is (as I suspect) a JavaScript stack overflow. The size of the JavaScript stack is usually a static limit that does not vary according to system – though different browsers do have different limits and even their own ways of measuring those limits. For example, on Firefox 3.6, there is a hard limit of 3000 nested function calls, regardless of the size of each stack frame. I think IE does a recursion limit also. Google Chrome, however, seems to allocate a certain amount of memory to the JavaScript stack and terminates when that limit is reached: you’ll get fewer recursions of functions with more local variables.
Thx for the suggestions. I’ll follow up more when I have access to my computer again. My daughter is using it for a research paper so I’m relegated to my old laptop.
