Interpreting Crash Logs: Explanations Needed

Question

Hi Everyone,
Allan Doyle just posted a crash report because Logic crashed on his system (sorry to hear about it Allan). Link is here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=432758&tstart=0
But the whole notion of a crash report... few if any of us are knowledgeable enough to understand the significance of any one part of it. Wondering if anyone here (Justin C. perhaps?) can help us make heads/tails of one of these reports. Maybe with a little information we can even understand if there's ANYTHING at all meaningful to be gleaned from them.
For example, from Allan's crash report:
Exception: EXCBADACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERNPROTECTIONFAILURE (0x0002) at 0x000007bc
I know what "Exception" means, but maybe there are some of us who don't. And I think that the second line refers to a "kernel panic" which, while I've heard the term, I really don't know what this means exactly.
Also, from Thread 0 (crashed) of Allan's report, I noticed a file called "com.apple.HIToolbox"
So can someone please shed some light on what these things mean?

Answer 1

I'm no expert at deciphering crash reports, but what is interesting [for the developer] is which thread crashed and what it was trying to achieve at that time. So all we can safely say here is a Logic thread branched somewhere in the CoreFoundation code while looping some audio soundbits: since you don't have the source code, you won't know why it crashed, although from the type of error, you can tell it attempted to read or write in a RAM area that wasn't owned by the process. Period.
From then on, you might extrapolate, but it's no use, since you have definitely no way to check, debug, or change the code to assign an uninitialized pointer, or whatever — this is intended for the developer only... The register values won't tell you anything, the other threads running should have kept running, and the Binary Images Description only tells you which other processes were also involved at that point.
Agreed, sometimes the report would give you a clue about which part of the code was wrong — caller or callee — when one of them is, for instance, a plug-in or a driver, so you may disable it, or merely avoid using it, and test whether Logic still crashes. But here, all you can do — as a user — is try and not recreate the specific conditions that lead to that crash...