My Web server crashed over the weekend and while this is a really rare occasion, it seems to happen about once a month or so. There’s a large number of a mish-mash of applications running on that server ranging from ASP.NET 1.x, 2.x and a whole slew of ISAPI/FoxPro applications.

Crashes are very rare but they do happen causing the W3WP.EXE Application Host process to die or otherwise hanging an application. I run my West Wind Web Monitor on the site that monitors sites and checks to make sure they’re up and running. If they’re not West Wind Web Monitor fires off a batch file that does an IISRESET and also kills a few known dependent processes using KILL.EXE.

This has been working fine, but recently I’ve started to run into a problem where instead of crashing properly the machine gets hung on Debug dialogs. You know the dialog that says, “Do you want to debug this process”. The server had a copy of VS installed from way back when, and so it stops on this dialog.

What’s really odd is that the debug dialog seems to popup on KILL.EXE when it’s trying to kill the related processes. Kill.exe is a pretty basic utility that does essentially a TerminateProcess on the PID or Exe name – it seems really odd that this thing should do a hard crash.

For now I switched to using TASKKILL.EXE which is the system level replacement for Kill.exe – Kill.exe originally was only part of the NT Resource Kit and TASKKILL.EXE is a Windows component that ships on all machines. TASKKILL.EXE has a few more options as well and presumably is more up to date and supported as a Windows Component. So hopefully this will solve the symptom of KILL.EXE bombing.

But my problem is that I can’t remember or at this point figure out to change the error popup behavior so that it doesn’t hang the system.  Nothing I can do about the failure, but I don’t want to see this debug dialog (or any other dialog for that matter). I suppose the original behavior is not a whole lot better - I think the default behavior is just a message box with the error, but there ought be a way to have the system log the error and move on. The dialog must be coming from Windows - it can't be coming from the crashed process.

I looked into the system Error Reporting settings which are disabled, so that’s not it. Dr.Watson configuration just deals with dump files apparently, and I didn’t see any options there.

Anybody remember how to do this?