With that said, it also depends on what code is in your illegal ISR. If you have the default ISR still populated(from C2000Ware), these are typically just a infinite wait loop. With the emulator connected this will hold there, but in standalone if you have the watchdog enabled, eventually that will time out, and issue a XRSn as well. The second time around, if the variable was eventually written to, it would work for the same reasons as above.