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It appears that Microsoft decided to help customers to save full user dumps locally for later postmortem analysis. According to MSDN this is done via LocalDumps registry key starting from Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb787181.aspx

This is a quote from the article above:

[…] Prior to application termination, the system will check the registry settings to determine whether a local dump is to be collected. The registry settings control whether a full dump is collected versus a minidump. The custom flags specified also determine which information is collected in the dump. […] You can make use of the local dump collection even if WER is disabled. The local dumps are collected even if the user cancels WER reporting at any point. […]

From my understanding it is independent from the default postmortem debugger mechanism via AeDebug registry key and might help to solve the problem with native services. I haven’t tried it yet but will do as soon as I install Vista SP1 or install Windows Server 2008 RC0. If it works then dump collection might be easier in production environments because of no need to install Debugging Tools for Windows to set up a postmortem debugger.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

           

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Announcements, Crash Dump Analysis, Debugging, Tools, Vista, Windows Server 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.