title: Azure roles are cycling - WaHostBootstrapper.exe crashing, faulting module ntdll.dll
body: <p>This is driving me crazy: We have a Windows Azure cloud service with a ASP.NET MVC 3 project. There have been many changes lately, so we have to deploy it every few days.</p>
  
  <p>Sometimes (e.g. now), we're stuck on the following deployment error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Role instances recycled for a certain amount of times during an update or upgrade operation... 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><code>manage.windowsazure.com</code> tells us that instance 0 of our Staging deployment is non-healthy:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Recycling (Role has encountered an error and has stopped)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Instance 1 however is fine, the web services on instance 1 are working, <strong>so the cause of the error is not our code</strong>.</p>
  
  <p>We RDP'ed to the instance and examined the Application Event Log, which displays the following error multiple times:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Faulting application name: WaHostBootstrapper.exe, version: 6.0.6002.18488, time stamp: 0x505cf7da
  Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17696, time stamp: 0x4e8147f0
  Exception code: 0xc0000008
  Fault offset: 0x00000000000d4995
  Faulting process id: 0x970
  Faulting application start time: 0x01ce474976d706d2
  Faulting application path: E:\base\x64\WaHostBootstrapper.exe
  Faulting module path: D:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
  Report Id: c26d8be8-b33c-11e2-a9be-00155d3ab8c9
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When this happens, we are</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Re-imaging the instance</li>
  <li>Re-booting the instance</li>
  <li>Deploying again</li>
  <li>Creating a support ticket</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Some hours later, everything works again. <strong>We didn't change anything in the deployment, it just works again, like it did before</strong>. At the time Microsoft Support is reacting, everything is fine again, so we cannot show them the problem.</p>
  
  <p>This is so ridiculous and frustrating. We're losing days of work just because of this silly error.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Anyone else having these problems? Any ideas how we could stop that?</strong></p>