Question

I have a program that is throwing a run-time error dialog. Is there a way to programmatically detect which executable is the parent of this dialog box from another process?

Answer 1

Yes. The code would be something like this (error checking omitted):

HWND hWindow = FindWindow( NULL, windowName );
DWORD processId;
GetWindowTheadProcessId( hWindow, &processId );
HANDLE hProcess = OpenProcess( PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION, FALSE, processId );
GetModuleFileNameEx( hProcess, NULL, buffer, BUFFER_SIZE );

The GetProcessImageFileName() function is preferrable to GetModuleFileNameEx() if you aren’t concerned with older platforms.