Getting a dump of a process that crashes on startup

Question

On a customer machine (WinXP SP2) to which I have no access, I have a Win32 EXE (unmanaged C++) that crashes on startup. I guess the best way to troubleshoot this is to obta

Answer 1

Installing developer tools on a client machine would be my last resort, I must admit I hate the idea especially where there are alternatives that will work for you.

First sign up for WinQual. You'll now get access to crash dumps and other error from your customers automatically. As I recall this is a free service, no reason not to use it.

Since WinQual will likely take a while for the crash dump to get to you, and it is always nice to be a little more responsive to customers especially when you application crashes, use Dr. Watson. As I recall when the crash occurs, before clicking on the dialog you can run drwatsn32 from Start->Run or the command line and Dr Watson will pop up. At this point dismissing the crash dialog will generate a crash dump file. Should this fail, install Dr Watson by running it with the -i parameter on the command line.