Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] reference memory

["Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Daorong Yu said:
> I am integrating a protocol dissector into ethereal and getting the
> following error message:
>
> The instruction at "0x00000000" reference memory at 0x00000000". The
> memory could not be "read".

Some piece of code in the version of Ethereal you're running, or a library
that it's using, or a plugin it's using, is attempting to dereference a
null pointer.

This usually means somebody's calling a routine that can return a null
pointer but not checking whether the return value of the function was a
null pointer before using the pointer.

It might be your dissector that's doing that, either because it's
dereferencing the null pointer (because it didn't check) or because it's
passing that null pointer to a routine that's not supposed to be passed a
null pointer.  I'd suggest using a debugger to find out where that's
happening; I'm not a frequent Windows developer, so I can't give much
advice on how to do that.