Can you imagine debugging this for that many months only to find out there was nothing on your end to fix.
Can you imagine debugging this for that many months only to find out there was nothing on your end to fix.
Another confounding one was where I was trying to bulk copy some data to Sybase using Python. Started getting some really strange DB errors. Couldn't figure it out for a while. Turns out, it was a bug in the DB module and it was using uninitialized memory in certain conditions. Was a 1-line fix, but took about 6 weeks to find.
Yet another one was when I was working on porting my C++ services from 32 to 64-bit. Sockets were timing out immediately sometimes. Couldn't reproduce in the debugger. Was a bug in a 3rd party framework. It was improperly using the rtdsc instruction in some inline ASM. Worked fine on 32-bit, but the register layout was different on 64-bit. So, it was effectively reading a garbage upper 32-bits for the high-res timer. Only found that one because I noticed in my logs that my timers were reporting that some operations had taken >200 years. I forget how long it took to track that one down, but it was months of off and on hunting.
I've also hit internal compiler errors. The one I remember was that an anonymous namespace at global scope would cause an ICE. I was about to file a bug report once I'd a minimal reproduction, but it'd already been reported and fixed.
Edit:typo fixed for pentium