I love Autoruns. Think msconfig on steroids. It truly reveals everything that starts up with Windows. Well almost everything. A couple days ago a user complained to me of a popup error they were receiving after logon. I had no doubt I would find the offending process in Autoruns, since the error message revealed the process name: 
Archive for the ‘Troubleshooting Tools’ Category
As Good as AutoRuns is, Sometimes You Still Need to Manually Search the Registry
Posted by William Diaz on April 2, 2012
Posted in Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Autoruns | Leave a Comment »
Hung Up In Outlook
Posted by William Diaz on April 2, 2012
One of the most common complaints your going to encounter in the desktop support role is when Outlook becomes unresponsive while a user is performing any random task in Outlook, whether it be switching between folders, going into a delegated mailbox, or sorting messages. Often, the knee-jerk reaction by the front line technical support is to assume something is wrong with Outlook and begin the gamut of what I term “blind-troubleshooting”. This usually involves running an range of scripted fixes (that is meant to address issues with some of our in-house or 3rd party add-ins), followed by a repair, reinstall, and/or creation of a new Outlook profile. Over the lifetime of this incident(s), the issue can drag out to several days because usually the issue cannot be reproduced immediately after the first fix, so each additional fix is tried at some point later when the user calls back. In some cases, this drags out for a couple weeks to where the user’s workstation is replaced or Windows profile is recreated.
And all to no avail.
Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Hang, Outlook | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the Missing Visio Menu Bar
Posted by William Diaz on March 1, 2012
When opening Visio, the user didn’t see the common Menu Bar one normally see in Microsoft Office products before 2007. The menu bar contains the literal menu options like File, Edit, View, Insert, so on. There was also the presence of a 3rd party toolbar that didn’t look like it was properly functioning:
Perhaps the Menu bar was disabled. This can be checked by right-clicking in the menu bar area and selecting Customize, then Toolbars.
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Posted in Office, Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Process Monitor | 1 Comment »
Dealing With An Un-Killable Process
Posted by William Diaz on February 9, 2012
The other day while trying to remove some add-ons from Internet Explorer, Windows DEP was kicking in and closing the IE Setting control panel box (rundll32.exe process) for whatever reason:
Or at least it was trying to. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Crash, Dr Watson, Hang | Leave a Comment »
Getting the 32 Bit Stacks in a 64 Bit Dump
Posted by William Diaz on February 8, 2012
After loading up Word today, I noticed it would become hung each time I went to the Insert tab. I was able to reproduce the behavior after killing the process and starting it up again. To troubleshoot, I started by going to the Windows 7 Task Manager, right-clicking, and selecting Create Dump File from the context menu:
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Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Dump, Hang, WinDbg, Word | 1 Comment »
Exploring Video-Graphics Performance – Event IDs 500 and 501
Posted by William Diaz on December 8, 2011
If you had a chance to review the Diagnostics-Performance logs, you may have encountered warning events coming from event ID 500 “The Desktop Window Manager is experiencing heavy resource contention. Video memory resources are over-utilized and there is thrashing happening as a result…” or 501 “…Graphics subsystem resources are over-utilized.”
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Posted in Inside Windows, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Performance, Process Explorer | 2 Comments »
Some PDF Internals
Posted by William Diaz on November 2, 2011
Often times when sorting through Process Monitor logs, you find yourself having to employ some intuition to zero-in on what is an otherwise vague result: NAME NOT FOUND. Its normal to see these results en masse, and most of these are perfectly legit. But knowing how to apply a few filters and some basic understanding of what you are looking for is sometimes enough to narrow down why your application is failing. In a previous post, I demonstrated this approach. Here is another example.
In this case, the user was not able to open PDFs from within our Outlook-integrated document management system. The error reported was rather generic as you can see below: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Outlook, PDF, Process Monitor | 1 Comment »
Repair Office To Fix Issues With Internet Explorer
Posted by William Diaz on October 12, 2011
In technical support, there is a common knee-jerk reaction when something doesn’t work in Microsoft Office: run a repair of the product or reinstall it. My colleagues have probably spent several hours combined going through this step countless times. Often (often is 99% of time) this fails to resolve whatever issue they are encountering. Over the course of a few years of troubleshooting Office, a repair has only corrected an issue once ( or maybe twice). In our case, it’s the nature of the custom environment that is chock-full-o-add-ins. Other times it is some weird, unexplained element of a document, spreadsheet, or whatever that just doesn’t want to work. Those can be rather complex to figure out sometimes.
That being said, sometimes repairing MS Office fixes issues in areas you might not otherwise think. For example, I recently setup a small document library in SharePoint, but while trying to edit the files from Internet Explorer some of the tech workstations were reporting the following error: “Windows Internet Explorer – ‘Edit Document’ requires a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible application and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater.”
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Posted in Office, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Internet Explorer, Office, Process Monitor | Leave a Comment »
An Oldie But Still A Goodie–Dr. Watson
Posted by William Diaz on October 3, 2011
A few years ago I started to see several complaints of Internet Explorer crashing in the course of a couple months. The error was one of the rather vague exception messages thrown at the time of the crash and didn’t allude to anything obvious. Tired of not being able to explain through any of the conventional troubleshooting methods, I did a little research into advanced troubleshooting techniques and came across the Windows XP default debugger, Dr. Watson. Sure it sounds a little cheesy but this is actually a helpful little gem that has assisted me in resolving many cases of unexplained application crashes. And even though Microsoft has done away with drwtsn32.exe in all Windows operating systems after XP, the majority of small and large enterprises are still using XP, which means it should be one of core tools of any Windows XP troubleshooting guru. You’ll also see how, despite Microsoft moving to WER, Dr. Watson can still be leveraged by the Windows Vista/7 OS (just for the hell of it).
To use Dr. Watson, you don’t need to do anything. By default, it is the default Windows XP debugger. When an application experiences a exception of sorts that leads to a crash, ideally it is designed to dump that process and create two files, a plain text drwtsn32.log and a dump file named user.dmp, the latter which requires WinDbg to open and analyze. If you are not sure if Dr. Watson is the default debugger, you can run drwtsn32.exe –i to make it the default. You can also confirm by going to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug and looking in the Debugger string for drwtsn32 -p %ld -e %ld –g:
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Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools, Uncategorized | Tagged: Debugging, Dr Watson, Dump | Leave a Comment »
An Exercise in Troubleshooting the Mundane
Posted by William Diaz on September 21, 2011
Many errors or warnings you encounter in the Windows event viewer may not really have an impact on the operating system, such as causing performance bottlenecks or application errors. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bother me when I encounter rather vague, mundane, or unexplained errors, such as the Userenv event ID 1041 errors encountered here while recently reviewing some newly deployed workstation images at our helpdesk: “Windows cannot query DllName registry entry for {insert guid here} and it will not be loaded. This is most likely caused by a faulty registration.”
Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Leave a Comment »
Windows Explored 