I hope someone can help me get to the bottom of this. I've been at it for 3 days and have had no luck which is extremely frustrating.

In short, XAudio2 is throwing a 0x80000003 exception (from xaudio2_7.dll) on my friend's win 8.1 machine (same OS as the dev machine) that for the life of me I cannot reproduce over here. Now I understand that exception to be a STATUS_BREAKPOINT exception which should not be crashing the app right? As in something is really screwy here.

From what I can understand, the crash stems from one of these two back-to-back xaudio calls:

source->Start();
source->SubmitSourceBuffer(buffers[(int)effect]->xaBuffer());

Both calls have prior succeeded multiple times in the same application run and don't crash until later in the demo on my friend's machine. Again, the crash report shows the exception code as 0x80000003 from xaudio.

Can anyone with more expertise in windows dev please help me figure out this ridiculous problem?

thanks

A STATUS_BREAKPOINT exception will indeed cause a crash if there isn't a debugger attached. It generally means that DebugBreak() or __debugbreak() was called, possibly via assert().

I guess it's possible that XAudio debugging is enabled on their PC. You could add code to turn that off just in case. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee415752%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

You really need to be able to debug it on that PC, or at least get hold of a mindump from it. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d5zhxt22.aspx

He's def not running the debug version of the DLL (it loads xaudio2_7 and not xaudiod2_7.dll) and now he's reporting the crash on a second machine.

I've already taken up too much of his time with this so I really can't access the machine. I'm seriously about to cancel the windows version over this shit. 5 days and i'm about to pull my hair out. Debugging issues on a windows machine shouldn't be this complicated.