Installing Dr. Watson as the Postmortem Debugger

When an application error occurs, Windows can respond in several different ways, depending on the postmortem debugging settings. If these settings instruct a debugging tool to create a dump file, a user-mode memory dump file will be created.

The default postmortem setting is for a dump file to be written by Dr. Watson. This means that when an application crashes, Dr. Watson will be activated and will save a memory dump file. For details on how to alter this, see Enabling Postmortem Debugging.

If these settings have been changed, you can reinstall Dr. Watson as the postmortem debugger by running Dr. Watson with the -i option:

drwtsn32 -i

For details, see Dr. Watson Command-Line Options.

Dr. Watson on Windows XP and later versions of Windows

If Dr. Watson is activated on Windows XP or later, a message box will appear. This message box gives you the option of sending an error report to Microsoft. If you choose Don't Send, a dump file will be created and stored on your hard disk. If you choose Send Error Report, a dump file will be created and stored on your hard disk, and will also be transmitted to Microsoft over the Internet.

However, if you have manually set the \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug\Auto value to zero, the Don't Send button will simply terminate the application. The Send Error Report button will create a dump file and send it to Microsoft but will not store it on your hard disk. A third button, Debug, will create a dump file and store it on your hard disk.