Submitting a Crash Report

[andy55]

If G-Force or the G-Force Toolbar crashes on your Windows computer, please submit a Dr. Watson crash report in order for us to fix the problem. Without a Dr. Watson crash report, it's close to impossible for us to determine the cause of the crash.

The following are instructions for setting up Dr. Watson on Windows XP (if you do not follow these instructions, Windows will give you its normal error report, telling us nothing):

1) Open up a new command line console (Start Menu > Accessories > Command Prompt).

2) Type "drwtsn32 -i" (this will set Dr Watson to get launched when a crash occurs and write out a log file).

3) When a crash occurs, you'll see the normal WinXP window saying that G-Force has encountered a problem, etc. Click the "Don't Send" button and browse to "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson" (a couple of those folders may be hidden, so be sure you set your view options accordingly). Inside that folder, you should see the file drwtsn32.log with a timestamp corresponding to the time the crash occurred. This is the log file that you need to email -- email it to me at andy at soundspectrum dot com.

4) Delete your drwtsn32.log file. Each crash, Dr Watson will append the crash report to this file. So that we get a fresh start (and so I don't confuse your older, unrelated crashes with G-Force crashes), we want to delete this file.

5) Attempt to reproduce the crash. Now that you're starting with a blank Dr Watson log file, all you need to do is reproduce the conditions needed to cause the crash. Once this happens, simply email your drwtsn32.log file to me.

When you submit a Dr Watson crash log, please also provide a detailed description of the circumstances leading up to the crash. In other words, describe what you were doing that may have ultimately triggered the problem (bugs are often triggered by unusual environments or specific input).

Thanks,
Andy