Dr Watson PostMortem Debugger
 

Hello everybody, well i've been doing some research on the internet about the Dr Watson postmortem debugger thing and also could not find any other posts here on the TFP about this, so i figured i'd post. I have this error message that pops up sometime, not all, but sometimes when i open windows Explorer. and things seem to lock up, untill i ctrl-alt-del and end the process and then things go back to normal. I also have Web root spy sweeper, as i read something about it in a google search, but that advice didnt seem to help me. anyway I also read about changing the registry value for the debugger and I was wondering if this is a good idea, or if anybody else has any other suggestions or ideas. Thanks for the info

Justin

Okay, before you do anything, slow down. What OS are you running? Have you edited the reistry before? Why do you want to edit the registry? How long has your copy of windows been running (before your last reformat)?

If you haven't formatted in a while, and you have everything backed up and a couple hours to kill, you might want to reformat.

Sorry for the lack of info, I am currently running XP home edition and just recently had a re-format (not done my me) and they installed Service pack 2, i did not get this problem before the reformat or SP2. I was just wondering if the registry change would cure this problem, as things seem to run fine untill i get that pop up. Is there a good reason for this debugger and should i leave it? thanks again.

After a quick Google, it looks like the registry edit would keep Dr. Watson from popping up. What concerns me, though, is that DW (supposedly) tells you that there's something wrong somewhere. If it's misfiring, fine. If not...
This is one of the many reasons I'm staying away from SP2. Good luck. Make sure you back up your registry before editing.

If Dr Watson is popping up, then most likely something has crashed. The freeze you're seeing is probably Dr Watson creating a dump file. It dumps the entire state of your system to a file, which can sometimes take a long time. You might try turning this off, to see if it at least eliminates the freeze. Go to Start | Run and type drwtsn32. On the window that pops up, uncheck "Create Crash Dump File".

You should really try to figure out what's crashing, though. Dr Watson popping up is just a symptom of the real problem.