>NT is less tolerant of memory mismanagement in general, but is far less likely to have an app crash and take the whole OS with it. The actual trap is done by the CPU's memory mangement subsystem; Windows grabs the ISR for the hardware error, determines the cause and shuts down the app that overstepped it bounds if necessary, messily in most cases, having a tendency to leave DLLs in an inconsistent state.

Incidentally, I recently upgraded to Win98 version 2, and was surprised to see that it seems to trap exactly like my NT machine at work does - virtually an identical message...interesting, I guess MS decided NT has the right idea. Not sure if it works quite as well, but so far it seems to.