Crash reporting

Please tell Microsoft

If a programme crashes, you will be shown a dialog like the one at the right (the appearance is a little different on Windows Vista, see below). If you are connected to the Internet, and you press Send Error Report then Windows will send some diagnostic information about the crash to Microsoft servers. Informatix retrieves this information from time to time, and analyses it to find out whether and why our programmes are crashing.

Although this is useful to us, and very little effort for you, there are three things which limit its usefulness:

1. In order to limit the amount of data which is uploaded by you, the information which we get is not comprehensive, and is sometimes insufficient to diagnose the cause of the fault.
2. There is nothing in the uploaded information intended to allow us to identify you. This means that we cannot get in touch if we need more information about the circumstances under which the problem occurs. Even if we can guess who the problem probably came from, we are still not allowed to contact you because the dialog box promises that we will treat the information as anonymous.
3. Microsoft collect together multiple reports of problems which appear, to their automatic analysis, to be related, and only tell us about them if there are several reports of the same issue. In addition, there can be delays of days or weeks before the data becomes available to us.

If you have the time, then, the following strategy will give us more comprehensive information, and a better chance of being able to respond promptly.

Dr. Watson (not available on Windows Vista)

Dr. Watson is a tool supplied with Windows versions prior to Windows Vista which (amongst other things) writes comprehensive diagnostic information to a disk file when a programme crashes. To set up Dr. Watson

1. Log in as a user with administrative privileges (this seems to be necessary when first setting up Dr. Watson in order to create the folder to which crash information will be written).
2. Choose Run... from the main Start menu, type drwtsn32, and press OK.
3. The Dr. Watson dialog box will be displayed.
   • Make a note of the Crash Dump path. This is the name of the file to which crash dumps are written when a programme crashes. This will probably be

     C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson\user.dmp

     or something similar.

   • Set the Crash Dump Type to Full.
   • Make sure that Create Crash Dump File is checked.
   • Press OK
4. You can now log back in as a normal user.

If, subsequently, an Informatix programme crashes, you can answer Don't Send to the Please tell Microsoft dialog box and, instead, send us the dump file which will be created. This file will be quite large (perhaps 100 - 200 MB), so please don't send it as an email attachment! Possibilities include putting it on an ftp server of yours where we can fetch it, or contacting us for access to our ftp server, or burning it to a CD-R and sending that.

In order to find the dump file, you may need to tell Windows Explorer to Show hidden files and folders on the Tools>Folder Options...>View dialog box, because C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data is a hidden folder.

A possible alternative is to set Crash Dump Type to Mini and send the resulting dump (which will be much smaller) to us by email. This will sometimes be enough for us to diagnose the fault, but if not we may need to ask you to collect and send us a full dump after all.

Any existing dump file is overwritten with a new one every time a programme crashes, so it is not normally necessary to delete old ones. If, however, the old one was created by different user on the machine, it's possible that you will not have sufficient privilege to overwrite it. If this is the case you will need to log in as a user with enough privileges and delete the old one by hand.

Note that as well as writing a dump file, Dr. Watson also appends very brief information about each crash to a log file usually called

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson\drwtsn32.log

This information is difficult to interpret, and is not usually comprehensive enough to let us diagnose the problem.

Windows Vista

On Vista, when a programme crashes, a dialog like this is displayed. Do not press the Close program button yet. Right-click some empty space on the Taskbar at the bottom of your screen and choose Task Manager from the menu which appears.
The Task Manager window opens. Find the program which has crashed (for example, microgds.exe or piranesi.exe), right-click it and choose Create Dump File from the menu which appears.
A dump file is written to your temporary file directory, and a message is displayed: make a note of the filename.

You can now close the Task Manager window and press the Close program button on the original dialog box.

Send the dump file, which will be quite large (perhaps 100 - 200 MB), to us by ftp or CD-R, as described above.

Visual Studio

If one or more versions of Visual Studio is installed, then they will have declared themselves as available debuggers, and you may be shown this dialog box instead of the Please tell Microsoft dialog box. If you are, then the following procedure will generate a suitable diagnostic dump file.

1. Select a version of Developer Studio, if necessary, and choose Yes to the Do you want to debug using the selected debugger? question.
2. Developer Studio will start, and show a crash dialog box. Press the Break button.
3. From the Debug menu, choose Save Dump As...
4. Select Minidump with Heap for the type of dump.

Send the dump file to us by ftp or CD-R, as described above.

Alternatively, you could save the dump twice, once as a plain Minidump and again as a Minidump with Heap, email the first smallish version to us but hang on to the large second one in case we need to ask you for it.

Another strategy, not available on Windows Vista, is to execute the command

drwtsn32 -i

to re-install Dr. Watson as the default application debugger, but you may not want to do that if it would interfere with your normal use of Developer Studio. If you have executed drwtsn32 -i and you want to reinstate Visual Studio's just-in-time debugging facilities, then

1. Choose Tools>Options... from the Visual Studio menu.
2. Select Debugging>Just-In-Time from the list of options.
3. Ensure that Native is checked.
4. Click OK.