One of the most challenging issues for Windows administrators to troubleshoot is when a user application unexpectedly hangs or crashes. Due to the intermittent nature of crashes and hangs, it can be very difficult to "catch" the application misbehaving, leaving you with very few clues as to what caused the problem.
Fear not! There are a few simple tools you can use to help isolate the issue to a particular program, DLL, error, or condition that may lead you to a documented workaround or patch. This article will survey a variety of free tools, including Mark Russinovich's new ProcDump utility, which can assist you with troubleshooting applications that crash or hang so you can intelligently search the World Wide Web for a solution.
Free tools
Everyone loves free tools, but sometimes there's still a price to pay for them on the Internet. Free tools often require you to provide an email address before you download them so you can be spammed by product offerings for years to come. They can also open the floodgates for spyware or other Trojans which can negatively impact your server. For these reasons, I rarely download non-Microsoft tools.
Fortunately, Microsoft offers a variety of free tools that can be used to troubleshoot hanging applications and outages. For years now, a tool called Dr. Watson has been available as part of the Windows operating system. When properly configured, Dr. Watson will detect applications that crash and provide a log file and user dump file for troubleshooting. Analyzing this data will often lead to a known error code or condition that has a documented workaround or hotfix. For more details on using Dr. Watson, you can refer to the Microsoft KB articles 246084 and 278689, or ...
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