What is a Crash?

IES software is built upon layers and layers of software components from the program itself through shared and 3rd party libraries, compiler libraries, system utilities, operating system services, and hardware "drivers", plus the hardware itself. Any one of these layers can cause the system to malfunction. A crash usually means that a program tried to operate on a non-existent memory location, or tried to access memory belonging to another process.

IES tools often report crash diagnostics directly to IES for monitoring and debugging. However, diagnostics do not always get sent, and are not dealt with on a daily basis, so manually reporting continuing problems is strongly recommended.

IES works very hard to prevent application errors through sound programming practices and tools, thorough testing in a variety of environments, and through customer beta tests. Continual feedback from customers regarding crashes will also help improve the quality of IES tools. But the fact remains: crashes will happen.

Can you Reproduce It?

Random crashes are virtually impossible to deal with. You can report it, but the odds of fixing it without serious diagnostic information are slim. If you can reproduce a crash in your IES product and document the steps taken to reproduce it, this information will be most helpful to IES engineers in solving your problem. If you can experiment to find a way around the crash, that information can help you "work around" your problem now and can help IES engineers to better understand when and why a crash is happening in order to "solve" (i.e., fix) the problem for the future.

Ways to Get Crash Details on Your System

Locate the Problem Reports and Solutions information in your Control Panel. Windows keeps track of which applications crashed, and you can right-click on the item to get light-weight diagnostic information to report to IES. If a dump file was created, it may be located in C:\Windows\Minidump, or it may be in C:\users\<your login>\Local\...

The Windows Event Log may also contain information to help you determine exactly what program crashed, though it rarely has information useful to IES support.