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Asked: 2026-05-11T11:38:55+00:00

On a customer machine (WinXP SP2) to which I have no access, I have

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On a customer machine (WinXP SP2) to which I have no access, I have a Win32 EXE (unmanaged C++) that crashes on startup. I guess the best way to troubleshoot this is to obtain a (mini-)dump and analyze it later with windbg or similar.

Now, I would normally tell the customer to install Debugging Tools for Windows and run

cscript adplus.vbs -crash

However, it appears that you can’t use adplus for apps that crash on startup (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q286350/ says that ‘Do not use ADPlus in the following situations: If you must troubleshoot a program or process that quits unexpectedly during startup’). The same article says ‘use User Mode Process Dump’, but I failed to install it successfully.

Any idea of how to get a dump of a process that crashes on startup on Win32?

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1 Answer

  1. You can install WinDBG on the client machine and then use ‘Image File Execution Options‘ and set WinDBG to open once that the process has started. Then run the crashing process and WinDBG will open up immediately. press g (Go) and wait for the process to crash then type ‘.dump /mfh dumpFileName.dmp‘. Now you have dump file that you can debug.

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