Re: randomly unknown software exception

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Well, this is where I got the ecact exception message from... So I wonder if
I can do something inside our software to get a more detailed error message.

Could it make sense to write an unhandled exception handler? Would it be
possible to get a stack trace from there if an exception like this happens
again?


Probably the simplest way is to configure Dr.Watson to produce crash dump:

1) On the machine where the problem occurs, register Dr.Watson:
drwtsn32 -i

2) then open its configuration dialog:
drwtsn32
and check "Create Crash Dump File" (on WinXP/2003 also select the kind
of the dump (either Full or Mini, depending on whether you can transfer
full dump to your machine from the user's one or not - test it on
your system to see the difference in size)). In this dialog you can also
specify the location where the dump will be written.

3) Set the following Registry setting:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug
Auto = 1 (REG_SZ)

Next time when the application crashes, the dump should be written
to the specified directory (on WinXP, the user might have to press "Debug" button
in Windows Error Reporting dialog, or "Don't Send" if "Debug" is not present;
on Win2000 the dump will be written automatically).

You can take a look at this article for information about debugging crash dumps:
http://www.codeproject.com/debug/postmortemdebug_standalone1.asp
and for advanced information here:
http://www.debuginfo.com/articles.html

Your application (release build) must be built with debug information.

If you do not want to ask the user to configure Dr.Watson on his system,
you can implement a custom filter for unhandled exceptions and produce
a minidump - the links above show how to do it.

In your case there is a small probability that Dr.Watson or in-process
exception handler / minidump will fail to catch the exception. If it happens,
don't give up - there are other ways to debug it.

Additionally, you might try to test the application with PageHeap
on your system, as described here, since the exception might come
from the heap manager:
http://www.debuginfo.com/tips/userbpntdll.html

Regards,
Oleg
[VC++ MVP http://www.debuginfo.com/]









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