CE 6.0 / .NET CF 3.5 Application has encountered a serious error (MC3100)

Question

When exiting my .NET CF 3.5 application on the Motorola MC3100 (CE 6.0 version only) I get the error message \"Application xxx has encountered a serious error and needs to shut

Answer 1

We experienced this issue with Motorola MC3190 devices running Windows CE 6.0 / .NET 3.5 CF. For months we were encountering an intermittent fatal error dialog upon closing our application. Every possible option was explored from ThreadAbort exceptions to making sure every single resource was properly disposed.

Normally, if a device doesn't have a particular font or is trying to access one that happens to be unrecognized, it will default to Arial. With the MC3190 however, if a font isn't recognized, the device will display a fatal error dialog and freeze after exiting an application. This results in the user having to warm boot (sometimes cold boot).

We came up with two solutions to this problem:

1. Set the application-wide font to something that is supported (replace Tahoma with Arial)
2. Reset any global Font objects either by instantiating with a supported font OR setting to null.