Has anyone had and solved a problem where programs would terminate without any indication of why? I encounter this problem about every 6 months and I can get it to stop by having me (the administrator) log-in then out of the machine. After this things are back to normal for the next 6 months. I've seen this on Windows XP and Windows 2000 machines.
I've looked in the Event Viewer and monitored API calls and I cannot see anything out of the ordinary.
UPDATE: On the Windows 2000 machine, Visual Basic 6 would terminate when loading a project. On the Windows XP machine, IIS stopped working until I logged in then out.
UPDATE: Restarting the machine doesn't work.
Perhaps it's not solved by you logging in, but by the user logging out. It could be a memory leak and logging out closes the process, causing windows to reclaim the memory. I assume programs indicated multiple applications, so it could be a shared dll that's causing the problem. Is there any kind of similarities in the programs? .Net, VB6, Office, and so on, or is it everything on the computer? You may be able to narrow it down to shared libraries.
During the 6 month "no error" time frame, is the system always on and logged in? If that's the case, you may suggest the user periodically reboot, perhaps once a week, in order to reclaim leaked memory, or memory claimed by hanging programs that didn't close properly.
You need to take this issue to the software developer.
The more details you provide the more likely it will be that you will get an answer: explain what exact program was 'terminating'. A termination is usually caused by an internal unhandled error, and not all programs check for them, and log them before quitting. However I think you can install Dr Watson, and it will give you at least a stack trace when a crash happens.
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I have a new Win10 laptop. I've installed lots of software, including a 25-year-old Codewright editor that I've customized up the wazoo, and that I've been installing on all my machines for, well, 25 years. After working for a few days, it suddenly stopped, and reinstalling it didn't fix it. On startup, it puts up a small splash window, and normally opens the main window a half a second later (that took more than 5 seconds 25 years ago). It's not using any CPU, and there's nothing I can do but kill the process.
In the past, I've occasionally got my system into a state where Codewright would hang on loading, due to some other program that hadn't terminated correctly, and it was unfrozen by killing off that other process. So that's reason to believe that Codewright is waiting at some global lock which some other malfunctioning software is holding. So I have two questions:
Does this ring a bell? Is there some known failure mode where a program putting up a splash window then switching to another window can be prevented by something else going on the system?
Is there a way to diagnose this, perhaps by finding out what system call it's hanging inside? I tried dtrace.exe, started Codewright, and then stopped tracing, and it produced a 3GB XML file, which is quite a haystack. There's a way to filter it by PID, but since this is a startup problem, I have no idea what the PID will be. Is there a better tool for doing this, or some more appropriate dtrace feature that I missed?
The comment about using the Task Manager to create a dump file actually led me to notice that there is an Analyze Wait Chain function there that I had never seen before, since I haven't used Task Manager much since I switched from Win7. This gave me exactly the answer I wanted. My editor was waiting for something that was being held by some NVIDIA GeForce Experience module. Since I don't use that, I uninstalled it, and I'm back up and running. Thanks for the tip.
When my Windows 10 app runs, it causes a process called Runtime Broker to execute, which takes up a lot of Memory space.
I know my app isn't "Memory-hungry" and it hardly takes 80 MB of RAM to execute. But from the time it starts, the Memory used by Runtime Broker keeps in increasing until the PC gets stuck.
Upon killing that process, the app is force closed by Windows.
I would have posted my source code here, if only I knew which part of the code is causing this to happen.
What are the possible technical reasons for this problem to happen, and what are the possible fixes in my code to prevent this?
Is there something wrong with my code, or is it some API that I am calling?
You can easily delete RuntimeBroker.exe and any other file. I deleted RuntimeBroker.exe and Livecomm.exe by booting a live Linux Dvd and after loading go and mount the c: drive then simply navigate to the file and delete it. Done!
Runtimebroker seems to hold about 60k per file held via StorageFile objects. It's still a bad problem and the only solution is to not hold on to very many of these.
Microsoft just never does anything about this.
Update: Microsoft seems to have quietly ditched UWP. The replacement has "WinUI" and is probably called the Windows App SDK at the moment. No more runtimebroker.exe.
I'm debugging plugins on Windows 7 and of course the plugin host (Cubase5.exe) occasionally crashes because of errors in the plugin. On XP or Vista, I could always restart it immediately and continue working. But on Windows 7, even though Cubase appears to close, it is still visible in Task Manager and I cannot kill it by any means. After a minute or two, it disappears by itself. In the mean time, I can't work because the plugin DLL is still locked by the process.
Does anyone know why this happens on Windows 7? I've already tried disabling Automatic Error Reporting but that didn't help. I've tried attaching cdb to Cubase, but I get:
Cannot debug pid 5252, NTSTATUS 0xC0000001
"{Operation Failed} The requested operation was unsuccessful."
Debuggee initialization failed, NTSTATUS 0xC0000001
"{Operation Failed} The requested operation was unsuccessful."
I tried following the instructions here but it appears this is only possible if I connect a second machine to my computer to debug it remotely.
I finally found the solution, using this article:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/17/unkillable-processes.aspx
This required installing the Windows Debugging Tools for Windows (nice name) and LiveKd, but by following the steps outlined I was able to track which driver was causing the process to hang: it turned out to be the 64-bit driver for the M-Audio Oxygen 8 V2 controller I'm using. Unfortunately no driver update is available.
Anyway, if anyone encounters a similar problem, this is the way to solve it.
Have you tried Process Explorer by Mark Russinovich? It is really useful for "killing":)
If you have error reporting enabled, it's possible that werfault.exe has Cubase open to write a minidump for crash reporting purposes.
This is just a stab in the dark but it might be your problem.
One thing you can try is to check with Process Monitor what Cubase is doing. Set a filter so that everything with a process name containing "cubase" will be recorded. It could be that you are facing some timeout issue when Cubase wants to exit.
you can end the process the service is running under. You can find this process by going to the Services tab of the Task Manager, right-clicking, and selecting Go To Process(you need to click the Show processes from all users button.). Note that one process may host multiple services (especially if it's svchost.exe), and ending the process will kill all those services. Also, this is an unclean exit, and may cause data corruption depending on what the service(s) was doing when you killed it.
Depending on which specific service you are trying to stop, there may be a cleaner way to simulate failure.
I need some "light" to get a solution. Probably there are tons of things that cause this problem, but maybe somebody could help me.
Scenario: a Windows server running 24/7 a PostgreSQL database and others server applications (for processing tasks on database, etc...). There are differents servers scenarios (~30), with different hardware and windows versions (XP SP3/ WinServer, etc... all NT based). All aplications were written in Delphi7, and link to DLLs (in D7 also).
After some days (sometimes a week, sometimes a couple of months), Windows begins to act strange, like not opening start menu, some buttons are missing in dialogs. And soon some applications do not open, raising a event on eventviewer:
Faulting application x, version y, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 5.1.2600.5781, fault address 0x00012afb
In mean while, others applications open fine, like notepad, iexplore, etc... but SOME of my applications don't, with only event log described above. But if we do not restart system, in a few days even cmd.exe stops open, (and all other applications) with same error on eventlog.
I've tried to find 'what' can cause this, but with no sucess. So, and any advice will be welcome.
Thanks in advance.
I think you are running out of resource handles (Window handles). You can verify this by having a look at the system properties in Sysinternals Process Explorer (a better task manager). I think even the default task manager can help out to display a handle count. Then you can identify which application is causing the trouble.
Once you know the application leaking and if it is yours, you can use Rational purify or Boundschecker to drill down to the problem. If you do not have money for these tools you will have to reduce the problem manually a bit by deactivating some features for example and see if the handle count still increases...
Not sure if it is the problem you are experiencing maybe it is completely unrelated. But easy to check. The track is that some app is stealing some global resources as you experience trouble with other applications. Applications like notepad do not use much resources so appear to work fine, heavy apps are more likely to show up the trouble.
Hope it helps.
An application is hanging occasionally, and I would like to see the dump at the time to figure it out. I had written an application that the user can run to automatically create a dump that I can look at. However I can't seem to get the users to remember to run it when it hangs, no matter what I try. They always end up closing the program, which invokes Windows Error Reporting.
WER will create dumps in the temp directory, but unfortunately they are deleted as soon as the dialog for sending the info to Microsoft or not is closed.
Becoming an ISV and getting this info from Microsoft's error reporting servers is one solution.. but not one that is realistic at the moment.
I can't imagine that I am the only one faced with this issue. The software is used concurrently by dozens upon dozens of staff, so reaching them all and getting them to run an application or not click close on that dialog until running some other application or etc has not been working out.
The app is running on Windows Server 2003. Too bad, since I know Server 2008 has some LocalDumps options that will let me retain them.
Any ideas for somehow keeping these dumps around so I can analyze them? The obstacle is the user, in the sense that I've accepted to their stubbornness and do not expect them to run any other application or do anything special.
Thanks for any advice!
You could opt for an automatic solution. I believe there're multiple options at your disposal for detecting if you're hung.
One would be the use of SendMessageTimeout (also pay attention to SMTO_ABORTIFHUNG as one of the fuFlags values) from a separate thread in your app. Once you have determined the main thread is not responding you can save a dump file wherever you want.
There's also a IsHungAppWindow() (user32.dll) available since w2k.