It doesn’t surprise me when Internet Explorer crashes. Instead, I remain calm and collected (most of the time). I don’t expect the average person to know why or how it happened and I expect them to take the opposite approach and be fed up with IE. But with everything that’s happening with the endless number of add-ons that it needs to support and the dynamic nature of web content, it’s amazing it works more often than not. So, here I was asked to explore the latest case of IE crashing. Our user has logged into an online document collaboration site. They need to open and print several dozen documents. About half the time, the client is interrupted by the following error before IE crashes: “Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library. Runtime Error!.. iexplore.exe. abnormal program termination”
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Another Instance of Internet Explorer Crashing (or Update Your IE Add-Ons)
Posted by William Diaz on October 13, 2010
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Dump, Internet Explorer, WinDbg | Leave a Comment »
Do You Want to GPF Today?
Posted by William Diaz on October 12, 2010
She called me one day. I had no idea who she was. She was in one of our local offices and someone told her I was the crack desktop support tech to speak to cause “he knows a lot.” This is true, no doubt, and I’m honored some people think this highly of me. Since then, she has called me over many an issue, and in particular turned me on to what has become a known bug between Internet Explorer, a 3rd party toolbar application we use for tracking time (LexisNexis for the benefit of search queries for this in my SharePoint blog), and shipper’s tracking website. This would happen while trying to print shipping labels via Internet Explorer. Yes or No would crash IE. The error would often present itself as the following: “Runtime error. Corrupt block/Unknown block type freed. This is probably caused by freeing a static variable or bad pointer. Do you want to GPF?” 
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Dr Watson, Internet Explorer | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the Failed PDF Print Jobs
Posted by William Diaz on October 11, 2010
I was asked to provide a second opinion to a case where a user was unable to print to PDF using the BullZip virtual printer. There were no errors of any sort but nothing happened anyway. The escalations team had already gone about deleting and reinstalling the software printer to no avail. The issue was also tested under different user accounts, where the printing also failed, which meant we were dealing with a system problem and not something isolated to the local user profile. i.e. the culprit likely resided in HKLM.
To start, our first clue revealed itself in the properties of the BullZip PDF printer:
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: PDF, Printing | Leave a Comment »
Manual Discovery and Removal of Malware
Posted by William Diaz on October 6, 2010
If you have not had a chance, set aside some time to watch Advanced Malware Cleaning, an excellent webcast by Mark Russinovich. I used some of the techniques from that presentation to identify and remove malware on systems I have come across.
In the case here, the user would open Internet Explorer but was not able to connect to the Internet. This would happen a couple times a day. The problem was tracked down to the Proxy field not populating with the office ISA address and the field remained grayed out so it could not be toggled on directly. The issue could be worked around temporarily by editing the registry to enable the proxy but at some point it was getting removed again. I was already suspicious that this was related to malware because each day the user logged on, the virus protectionsuite would catch the same Dlls’ attempting to downloaded to the system and being deleted.
I would be using Process Explorer and Autoruns as my tools. Here were the first things I noticed:
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Autoruns, IE, Malware, Process Explorer | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the Persistent IE Security Prompts
Posted by William Diaz on October 2, 2010
In an earlier post, I blogged about a request where the user no longer wanted to be annoyed by the IE’s security information prompt when visiting secure sites and the problem involved in trying to circumvent this setting in an environment where this is controlled via group policy. This time, I came across an issue where the user was being interrupted by the same prompt when visiting an internal resource that should not be displaying the IE “Security Information” prompt for secure sites.
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Autoruns, Internet Explorer, Malware | Leave a Comment »
The Email That Refused to Print
Posted by William Diaz on September 17, 2010
From time to time we encounter requests where someone tries to print an email and encounters the following message prompt: “Items in this are still loading. Please wait a moment and try again.”
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Outlook, Printing | 1 Comment »
User Request – Get Rid of IE’s “Security Information” Prompt for Secure Sites
Posted by William Diaz on September 1, 2010
I’m always eager to learn some Internals, whether its Windows, Office or Internet Explorer. A request from one of our high-profile user provided me this chance. She wanted me to prevent the following message prompt from appearing when she visited secure sites (she did this a lot as part of her work): “This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the non secure items?”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Internet Explorer, Process Monitor | Leave a Comment »
The Case of the IE Print Failures
Posted by William Diaz on August 26, 2010
I was asked to assist when one of user’s was unable to perform the simple, mundane task of printing a web page in Internet Explorer. Furthermore, they could not even print preview the page. There was no error of any kind and IE simply went on with its business like nothing happened. I started my analysis by running Process Monitor on the workstation, creating a filter in the trace log for iexplore.exe. I then repeated the steps of the user by going to File > Print Preview and then stopped the trace log. There were just over 500 events logged in that one action, small enough that I was quickly able to scroll through it and I some Access Denied results: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Internet Explorer, Printing, Process Monitor | Leave a Comment »
Process Monitor & the BSOD
Posted by William Diaz on August 24, 2010
Very rarely do I ever experience a Blue Screen of Death. In fact, I can’t recall the last time I did, so it was worth taking a photo of:
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: BSOD, Crash, Dump, Process Monitor | 2 Comments »
Windows System State Analyzer
Posted by William Diaz on August 23, 2010
I blogged earlier about a Microsoft comparison tool, the Change Analysis Diagnostic for Windows XP. The idea there was to go back to a specified date and look at what had changed on the system to help troubleshoot any potential issues occurring as the result of installed software. You can read about it here.
The Windows System State Analyzer works with later versions of Windows but is different in that you take a snapshot of the pre-install environment, install the application and then take a post-install snapshot of the same system. When complete, you can then run a comparison of the two files from within the System State Analyzer to see what has changed.
To obtain the tool, go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=140110 (x86) or http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=140109 (x64). Read the rest of this entry »
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Windows Explored 