How to immediately terminate crashed application? - debugging

Question

I have an application that sometimes causes exceptions. And I need to restart it if it crashed. But the problem is, that I have Windows 7 here and when application crashes, Windows shows me nice dialog box with a suggestion to close the application. But the application itself is still running until I click "Close". How to get rid of this Window and make application terminate immediately without any dialog boxes?

Answer 1

Ideally you would catch all exceptions in the most outer scope of your program. However, sometimes you don't have the luxury of making such changes and the crash dialogs prevent you from recovering from a crash. In these cases you can consider disabling Windows Error Reporting, either entirely or for a specific program.
On Windows 7: Start Orb -> Control Panel -> Action Center -> Maintenance -> Check for solutions to problem reports -> Settings
Update: to completely disable the error reporting UI change the DontShowUI registry setting:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\DontShowUI

Answer 2

You can use the concept of the Dr Watson for detecting the crash and restarting the application. Use the following:
Set a Timer like:
SetTimer( eIsDwwin, 30000, NULL);
This will check the Dr Watson process after every 30 seconds in the system process using the following:
void CMainFrame::OnTimer(UINT nIDEvent) {
case eIsDwwin:
HANDLE hndl = CreateToolhelp32Snapshot(TH32CS_SNAPPROCESS,0);
DWORD dwsma = GetLastError();
DWORD dwExitCode = 0;
PROCESSENTRY32 procEntry={0};
procEntry.dwSize = sizeof( PROCESSENTRY32 );
Process32First(hndl,&procEntry);
do {
if(((!strcmpi(procEntry.szExeFile,"dwwin.exe"))||
(!strcmpi(procEntry.szExeFile,"drwatson.exe"))||
(!strcmpi(procEntry.szExeFile,"drwtsn32.exe"))||
(!strcmpi(procEntry.szExeFile,"WerFault.exe"))) &&
(procEntry.th32ParentProcessID == GetCurrentProcessId())) {
WSACleanup();
PostMessage( WM_CLOSE);
Sleep(500);
if(0==strcmpi(procEntry.szExeFile,"dwwin.exe")) {
system("TASKKILL /IM dwwin.exe /F");
} else if(0==strcmpi(procEntry.szExeFile,"drwatson.exe")) {
system("TASKKILL /IM drwatson.exe /F");
} else if(0==strcmpi(procEntry.szExeFile,"drwtsn32.exe")) {
system("TASKKILL /IM drwtsn32.exe /F");
} else if(0==strcmpi(procEntry.szExeFile,"WerFault.exe")) {
system("TASKKILL /IM WerFault.exe /F");
} else {
system("TASKKILL /IM WerFault.exe /F");
}
break;
}
} while(Process32Next(hndl,&procEntry));
CloseHandle(hndl);
break;
}
}
This will close the application which has crashed, gracefully.
Anothe way would be to use the Signal API in Windows for handling the exceptions and crashes.

Answer 3

Not knowing the language of your application makes it a little tough, but you can typically handle that by running your application within the equivalent of a try / catch block (as in C#, C++, or Python). In pseudo-Csharp-ish-code:
bool done = false;
main()
{
while( !done )
{
AppClass aclass = new AppClass();
try
{
aclass->Run();
}
catch( Exception x )
{
LogErrorSomehow(x);
delete aclass;
continue;
}
}
}
Essentially, the best way to get around an "unhandled exception" error is to handle the exception by catching it and taking appropriate action (even if that action is doing nothing).
In this example, if someone wanted to close your app you'd set the "done" value to true and return from Run().