What does exit status 1 (0x1) mean for a Windows GUI program?

Question

I have recurring occurrences of Internet Explorer (C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe) exiting with exit status 1 (0x1) in my Windows Eventlogs (event id 4689).

Whenever I google for the meaning of these exit codes I always just end up with this list (in different incarnations), where exit code 1 is said to mean "Incorrect function", also clarified with "Indicates that Action has attempted to execute non-recognized command in Windows command prompt cmd.exe".

This doesn't really make sense at all for Internet Explorer, so what does it really mean then?

Is there perhaps another list with exit status codes specific for event id 4689, with completely different meanings from that list that you always end up in on Google, or what am I missing here?

Answer 1

Exit status 1 can mean literally anything, except perhaps 'success'. These status codes are defined by the program itself, and in most cases you'll find 1 used as a catch-all for every possible failure.

(Many GUI apps don't propagate errors to the exit status at all, since practically nothing checks it.)

Only command-line tools sometimes use different codes to allow easier scripting, and even those typically reserve 1 as the "something else happened" catch-all.