For other managed first chance exceptions, Alexei is right that it is probably normal, however access violation exceptions are by definition only emitted from unmanaged or unsafe code, and the exception is only thrown after many attempts at reading unallocated memory, usually from a bad pointer, and indicates that the application's memory heap might be corrupted. This almost always indicates a bug in the application code. The managed equivalent would be a null reference exception, which will routinely occur in managed code for any code block trapping null references. Access violations cannot be trapped or handled starting with .NET 4.0 (other than by assemblies marked with a special attribute), and should be considered fatal.