How to debug login screen saver in Win7?

Question

I have a .NET.NET WinForms application that I am trying to use as a login screen saver (64-bit version of Win7Pro). It just works fine from the command line when I logged in and like my screensaver. However, it exits immediately upon startup as a login screen saver.

I know that he gets a CLR exception because his exit code is 0xE0434F4D, but I can't figure out how to debug it.

Is there a way to debug the login screen saver in Windows7?

Answer 1

You may be able to debug by joining a process from a remote computer using Visual Studio.

However, there may be a simpler solution. WinForms applications have a program class. If you put a Try-Catch phrase around the code in the Program class that runs your form, then when the application crashes, you can throw an Exception with a full stack. From there, you should be able to more easily identify the problem (which, in my opinion, will be related to privileges) and fix it.

Answer 2

If you want to debug the login screen, you will need a kernel debugger.

msvsmon, and the rest will not start from the login screen, because there is no user session (since you have not logged in yet).

Debugging the CLR from the kernel debugger will be interesting; you can get some basic CLR debugging coming from windbg, but that won't be easy.

You can simply create a log file (or use Event Tracing for Windows , which avoids tons of security issues) to track the failure.