Debugging .NET Problems on Remote User PCs

Question

I support a .NET IE Toolbar, for a population of users that have a variety of OS and IE versions, in a variety of remote locations. For a small number of these users, the toolbar installs properly, but never actually loads when they try to enable it in IE. We haven't been able to replicate this situation on our test pcs.

Most of our support is over the phone or via WebEx, so our access to the customer's pc is somewhat limited. I'm looking for a way to gather information like security settings, gpo policies, what assemblies are failing to load, and other low-level stuff that I'd normally look at with Visual Studio debugger and fuselogvw and other developer tools. However with my customer's pcs, I don't have the luxury of these tools, so I need to be a bit more resourceful.

So, what tools are either available on most pcs, or a simple free download that will let me get some detailed debugging information?

Answer 1

Not a cheap solution, but take a look at BMC AppSight.

Answer 2

In the past I've set up a zip file that contained some of the contents of the Debugging Tools for Windows like CDB and ADPlus which can be installed just by unzipping it on a users machine.

There was then some scripts to control CDB to capture the typical information I needed from the process (loaded modules, exception traces, and the like), zip it up and with a couple of ancillary files (the exact copy of the .NET SOS.dll on the machine) and I could copy it back to examine at leisure. Worked reasonable well for the sort of problems I was facing.

The zip file was about 4Mb so not to bad to pass around; and you could just delete the contents when done.