The complaint: Excel would hang while opening. When it finally did come to life, it would keep getting hung doing almost any task. Often, these issues are troubleshot in a predictable manner: Repair Office, Uninstall Office, Reinstall Office, and, finally, take a shotgun to the user’s Windows profile and blow it away. Personally, I frown on these approaches; they only serve to make the user start from scratch while doing nothing in revealing the problem. Another downside to this approach is you may be dealing with something impacting several users/workstations, each being handled independently of an identical issue by the tech in the next cubicle. And, being that the problem was related to the user profile, specifically in HKCU, it is likely each one would have resulted in a Windows Profile recreation. If you have had to recreate a profile, these can be timely since not all setting’s in today’s large enterprise environments are copied into the roaming profile (think folder exemptions, for example). Read the rest of this entry »
Posts Tagged ‘WinDbg’
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Posted by William Diaz on November 14, 2010
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Autoruns, Hang, Process Explorer, WinDbg | Leave a Comment »
Another Instance of Internet Explorer Crashing (or Update Your IE Add-Ons)
Posted by William Diaz on October 13, 2010
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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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Dump, Internet Explorer, WinDbg | Leave a Comment »
Forcing a System Crash on a Unresponsive PC
Posted by William Diaz on July 20, 2010
This one comes in handy when a Windows based PC experiences a so-called “hard hang” and you need to force it to bug check and produce a dump for debug purposes. From the Windows registry:
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For USB keyboards go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters, create a DWORD value named CrashOnCtrlScroll equal to 11
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For PS/2 keyboards go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters, create a DWORD value named CrashOnCtrlScroll equal to 1
You will need to reboot afterwards. A crash can now be initiated by holding down the right CTRL key and pressing the Scroll Lock key twice. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Dump, Hang, WinDbg | 1 Comment »
The Case of the Crashing Email
Posted by William Diaz on July 7, 2010
One afternoon I had the luck of encountering a user who was experiencing random Outlook crashes while. As far as he was concerned, there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. He would just be clicking through email messages and then, suddenly, he would encounter the following error (but not always): “Inbox – Microsoft Outlook: OUTLOOK.EXE – Application Error – The exception unknown software exception (0x…) occurred in the application at location 0x…“
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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged: Crash, Dump, Outlook, WinDbg | 1 Comment »
Go Digging for the Exception
Posted by William Diaz on July 4, 2010
After moving to a new Internet Explorer based employee time management system, I started noticing a slew of reports coming in where IE was crashing when trying to access any of the menus within the browser. The error always presented itself as: “Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library. Runtime Error!..” 
Posted in Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting Tools | Tagged: Crash, Dump, IE, Process Explorer, WinDbg | Leave a Comment »
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