Anup Warrier had an issue recently with sys.messages queries generating an error:
What you normally expect when you run SELECT * FROM sys.messages? The query will return a row for eachmessage_id or language_id of the error messages in the system, for both system-defined and user-defined messages.
Rather than returning the rows, system generated an error for me:
Msg 18058, Level 17, State 0, Line 1
Failed to load format string for error 362, language id 1033. Operating system error: 317(The system cannot find message text for message number 0x%1 in the message file for %2.). Check that the resource file matches SQL Server executable, and resource file in localized directory matches the file under English directory. Also check memory usage.
Anup follows up with the answer, so if you’re running into this issue, check out his post.