Disabling Windows error reporting (Dr. Watson) for my process

Question

I have an application that is hosting some unstable third-party code which I can't control in an external process to protect my main application from nasty errors it exhibits. My parent process is monitoring the other process and doing "the right thing (tm)" when it fails.

The problem that I have is that Dr. Watson is still detecting crashes in the isolated process and attaching to the processes on the way down to take a crash dump. This has the two problems of: 1. Dramatically slowing down the time that it takes for me to detect a failure because the process stays alive while the crash dump is being taken. 2. Showing annoying popups to the user asking if they want to submit the error reports to Microsoft.

Clearly I would prefer to fix the bugs in the child process, but given that it isn't an option, I would like to be able to selectively disable Dr. Watson (and Windows Error Reporting in Vista+) for that process.

I am running some of my own code in the process before handing off to the untrusted bit, so if there is an API that I can call that affects the current process that would be fine.

I am aware of: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/188296 which would disable Dr. Watson for the entire machine. I don't want to do that because it would make me a bad citizen to trash a machine-wide setting.

I am also aware of the WerSetFlags option in Vista+ that would seem to disable windows error reporting for the current process, but I need something that will disable Dr.Watson on earlier OS versions.

Answer 1

You want to disable the GPF popup: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/27/198410.aspx

Answer 2

The good doctor is invoked when a process does not handle a certain exception. Therefore, the common way to go would be to handle all exceptions yourself. In your case, it is much harder since you don't own the crashing process code. What you can do then, is to inject your code into the other process at runtime, and install an exception handler that will swallow the exception causing the crash. When caught, gracefully shut down the process.

There are quite a few questions here talking about injecting code into another process. As for the crash handler, you can either set an unhandled exception filter, or add a vectored exception handler. Note that for the latter, you'll have to be careful not to swallow legit exceptions that are in fact handled inside the other process, namely find a way to recognize the crashing exception and make sure it is the only one you handle.