What's the purpose of the CIL nop opcode?

Question

I\'m going through MSIL and noticing there are a lot of nop instructions in the MSIL.

The MSDN article says they take no action and are used to fill space if the opc

Answer 1

As ddaa said, nops let you account for variance in the stack, so that when you overwrite the return address it jumps to the nop sled (a lot of nops in a row) and then hits the executable code correctly, rather than jumping to some byte in the instruction that isn't the beginning.