Stack Overflow

A less obvious cause for a general protection violation is stack overflow. The stack is the system area in which called parameters and the calling program return address are temporarily stored for a CALL statement. Stack overflow occurs when the level of nesting of called subprograms, or the size or number of passed parameters is greater than the stack can manage.Stack overflow can occur due to excessive use of the stack, or because the default or requested stack size is small. You should bear in mind that operating system support routines might also make use of the stack and reduce its effective size, and that different versions of the same operating system can make different use of the stack, thus varying its effective size.