How do I disable the 'Debug / Close Application' dialog on Windows Vista?

Question

When an application crashes on Windows and a debugger such as Visual Studio is installed the following modal dialog appears:

[Title: Microsoft Windows]

X has stopped working

A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

[Debug][Close Application]

Is there a way to disable this dialog? That is, have the program just crash and burn silently?

My scenario is that I would like to run several automated tests, some of which will crash due to bugs in the application under test. I don't want these dialogs stalling the automation run.

Searching around I think I've located the solution for disabling this on Windows XP, which is nuking this reg key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug\Debugger

However, that did not work on Windows Vista.

Answer 1

You have to implement an unhandled exception filter which simply quits your application, then set that filter function with SetUnhandledExceptionFilter().

If you're using the secure CRT, you also have to provide your own invalid parameter handler and set this with _set_invalid_parameter_handler().

This blog post has some information too: http://blog.kalmbachnet.de/?postid=75

Answer 2

During test you can run with a 'debugger' like ADPlus attached which can be configured in many useful ways to collect data (minidumps) on errors and yet prevent the modal dialog problems you state above.

If you want to get some useful information when your app crashes in production you can configure Microsoft Error reporting to get something similar to ADPlus data.

Answer 3

To force Windows Error Reporting (WER) to take a crash dump and close the app, instead of prompting you to debug the program, you can set these registry entries:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting]
"ForceQueue"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\Consent]
"DefaultConsent"=dword:00000001

After this is set, when your apps crash, you should see *.hdmp and *.mdmp files in:

%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\WER\

Answer 4

I'm not sure if this refers to exactly the same dialog but here is an alternative approach from Raymond Chen:

DWORD dwMode = SetErrorMode(SEM_NOGPFAULTERRORBOX);
SetErrorMode(dwMode | SEM_NOGPFAULTERRORBOX);

Answer 5

See here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb513638.aspx

regedit

DWORD HKLM or HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\DontShowUI = "1"

will make WER silently report. Then you can set

DWORD HKLM or HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\Disabled = "1"

to stop it from talking to MS.

Answer 6

After trying everything else on the internet to get rid of just in time debugger, I found a simple way that actually worked and I hope will help someone else.

Go to Control Panel Go to Administrative Tools Go to Services Look down the list for Machine Debug Manager Right Click on it and click on Properties Under the General Tab, look for Start Up Type Click on Disable. Click on Apply and OK.

I haven't seen the debugger message since, and my computer is running perfectly.