Program error - how to read appcompat.txt?

Question

After the program, I debug the crashes, I am left with the heap dump file * .mdmp and appcompat.txt in my Temp directory. I understand that appcompat.txt is an error report. Is there a description of its format?

My appcompat.txt lists several dlls. Do I correctly assume that the cause of the failure could occur only from one of the listed DLLs? Can I limit the efforts to debug DLLs listed in appcompat.txt?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The minidump file is more informative for troubleshooting:

• Install Debugging Tools for Windows if you do not already have it.
• Set the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH symbol path variable to indicate Microsoft symbol server
• Launch Windbg and go to File -> Open Crash Dump and find the .dmp or .mdmp
• Type !analyze -v .

This will attempt to isolate the location of the failure. Please note that just because of a failure in a particular DLL does not mean that there is an error: this may be due to the fact that an invalid parameter was accepted from your application code. The analysis should hope to show you a meaningful stack and an error code that should help determine the actual cause of the failure.