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 What is a Crash?

IES software is built upon layers and layers of software components from the program itself through shared and 3rd party libraries, compiler libraries, system utilities, operating system services, and hardware "drivers", and hardware itself.  Any one of these can cause the system to malfunction.  A crash usually means that a program tried to operate on a non-existent memory location, or tried to access memory belonging to another process.

IES works very hard to prevent application errors through sound programming practices and tools, thorough testing in a variety of environments, and through customer beta tests.  Continual feedback from customers regarding crashes will also help improve the quality of IES tools.  But the fact remains: crashes will happen.

Can you Reproduce It?

Random crashes are virtually impossible to deal with.  You can report it, but the odds of fixing it without serious diagnostic information are slim.  If you can reproduce a crash in your IES product and document the steps taken to reproduce it, this information will be most helpful to IES engineers in solving you problem.  If you can experiment to find a way around the crash that information can help you "work around" your problem now and can help IES engineers to better understand when and why a crash is happening in order to "solve" (i.e., fix) the problem for the future.

Ways to Report the Crash

Microsoft Error Reporting: Built in to Windows XP and future systems is a crash reporting system.  IES can access this information to improve the quality of our tools.  If you are given the opportunity to report a crash to Microsoft, please do so.

Direct Report to IES: If you receive a crash report you will note that it contains three technical pieces of information: the Name of the running application, the name of the file (.dll or .exe) that caused the crash, and a memory address (a hexadecimal number like 0x01234567).  This minimal information can provide IES with a lot of information about the crash.  Furthermore, if you can locate the memory "dump" file (.dmp) that windows created to document the crash, you can zip it and email it to IES technical support.  This detailed diagnostic information can be very effective in helping IES prevent future crashes.  Dump files are created in TEMP folders.

Ways to Get Crash Details on Your System

On Windows XP: You can configure Dr. Watson to create a minidump file after a crash.  This file will be located in a folder like C:\Documents & Settings\<your login>\Local Settings\TEMP.  The file will probably be called user.dmp.

On Windows Vista: Locate the Problem Reports and Solutions information in your Control Panel.  Vista keeps track of which applications crashed, and you can right-click on the item to get light-weight diagnostic information to report to IES.  If a dump file was created it may be located in C:\Windows\Minidump, or it may be in C:\users\<your login>\Local\...

 

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