Hello,
  Just wondering if any of you have encountered really weird bugs and
support issues on machines that have been running for a long time (without a
reboot).

  Recently, I have noticed that we have been getting support calls for
strange app behaviour.  The kind of things that are being reported as going
wrong make no sense whatsoever.

  My first thought was that there might be a memory leak in my app, but
further investigation shows that there are none.

  There is no consistency to any of the reported faults, apart from the fact
that they are all "weird".  In each case, the app and the OS have an up-time
of more than 2 weeks. Often, the up-time is less than that required to cause
a bug with the roll-over of GetTickCount, so I can dismiss that.

  A reboot of the OS (or a restart of the app) always fixes any of the
weirdness.

  The app is built with D2006.

  The OS is XP embedded (and I have no idea which bits it includes and which
bits are left out from regular XP).

  The hardware is bargain-basement stuff, but so far, no blue screens, so I
probably can't blame the graphics cards, keyboards or mice.

  Over 1500 machines, we get about 3 or 4 reports a week of the Delphi app
misbehaving, so it doesn't sound like my fault (which in itself is unusual).

  All of the machines were purchased in November 2006, so there could be
some kind of burn-in time problem.

  I have no idea what to say to the customer other than to blame it all on
the hardware (as any programmer should), and say that they probably have
defective RAM.

  At a guess, I would say that my Delphi app has exhibited weirdness on less
than 1% of the installed base, but even at that level, I have to come up
with answers.  I have none.

  Should I say that you shouldn't let a Windows system run for longer than a
week without rebooting? (I hate to blame MS).

  I suspect that the reason that my own dev machine is so stable is because
Windows Automatic Update requires a reboot every few days as each new update
becomes available.

  Do you have a suggestion?

Trevor
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