Short for General Protection Fault, a computer condition that causes a Windows application to crash. The most common cause of a GPF is two applications trying to use the same block of memory, or more specifically, one application trying to use memory assigned to another application.

The following situations can also cause GPFs.

GPFs are often preceded by an invalid page fault.

  A page fault that produces an error. Page fault errors can occur for any of the following reasons:

The first two causes are the most common. These conditions can also cause a general protection fault (GPF).

An invalid page fault is also called a page fault error (PFE).

When you attempt to shut down your computer, start Windows, or start a program in Windows, you may encounter error messages that are similar to:

• fatal exception XY has occurred at xxxx:xxxxxxxx
• Fatal exception errors are codes that are returned by a program in the following cases:
• Access to an illegal instruction has been encountered
• Invalid data or code has been accessed
• The privilege level of an operation is invalid