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Is there any way to save the contents of Windows Error Reports?

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Mr. Perfect

Member
Joined
Jul 14, 2004
Location
New Jersey
Hi all,

Does anyone know of a way to save the contents of Windows Error Reports? I have one application that crashes constantly, which pops up a Windows Error Report (AKA the "Send error report/don't send error report" window).

It is possible to read the contents of the report, by clicking on "What data does this error report contain?" and then clicking on "View the contents of the error report.", but there is no way I can see to actually save a copy of it for reading later. :-/
 
Unfortunately, it doesn't. The program that crashes is using .Net, so while event viewer shows that there was a crash, it simply says that .Net crashed. The information in the WER isn't included.
 
Dr. Watson at the time of the crash should have created a log file called Drwtsn32.log (a text file which can be opened in Notepad), which is normally located in the following directory...

Code:
drive:\Documents and Settings\All Users.WINNT\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson
 
You, Sir, are correct! :attn:

It looks like I need to install the symbols package to get a complete log from Dr. Watson, but that should be fairly easy.

Thanks, redduc900.
 
Heh. For some reason Dr. Watson isn't logging crashes for this program.

Is there some special way of debugging programs that use .Net2?
 
^^You're too kind my friend... Mr. Perfect, try running Dr. Watson from the command prompt. At the prompt type drwtsn32 -p pid (replace pid w/ the process ID of the application in question... this specifies the process ID to debug). With the app. running you can find it's PID under the Processes tab in Task Manager. The next time the app. crashes, do a search in the root directory for any *.dmp and / or *.log files w/ a creation date that corresponds to the time of the crash. That's about all I can think of trying at the moment.
 
Hmm. No luck. When Dr. Watson tries to attach to the application, it crashes and takes Dr. Watson down with it. I've also installed the Debugging Tools for Windows from Microsoft(WinDBG), but the same thing happens when it tries to attach for debugging.

Windows does create an error report and sends it off to Microsoft when this program crashes, but those reports don't seem to be saved locally.

Thanks for your help though.
 
Hehe. I found it's files. :D

Just for giggles, I crashed the program again and did a Windows Search for newly created files while Windows Error Reporting was creating an error report to send to Microsoft. While the WER program is running, it creates two files in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp. One is a .dmp file, and the other is a massive .tmp file(It's actually a .dmp file, but the extension needs to be changed before it can be read). Once WER is done running, it deletes these two files. The only way I have found to save the files is to right click them and mark them as read only before WER closes. That way it can't delete these temporary files on close.

Now I just need to figure out how to read them. :eh?:

[Edit]Actually, forget that. I've got the .dmp files for the crash. The developer can sort through them, they'll probably only mean something to them anyhow.
 
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