Question: On a customer machine (WinXP SP2) to which I have no access, I have a Win32 EXE (unmanaged C++) that crashes on startup. I guess the best way to troubleshoot this is to obtain a (mini-)dump and analyze it later with windbg or similar.

Now, I would normally tell the customer to install Debugging Tools for Windows and run

```
cscript adplus.vbs -crash

```

However, it appears that you can't use adplus for apps that crash on startup (<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q286350/> says that "Do not use ADPlus in the following situations: If you must troubleshoot a program or process that quits unexpectedly during startup"). The same article says "use User Mode Process Dump", but I failed to install it successfully.

Any idea of how to get a dump of a process that crashes on startup on Win32?

Answer: 
Here is a nice way to collect Vista SP1 crashes:

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb787181(VS.85).aspx>

No need to install anything on the machine!
Installing developer tools on a client machine would be my last resort, I must admit I hate the idea especially where there are alternatives that will work for you.

First sign up for [WinQual](https://winqual.microsoft.com/). You'll now get access to crash dumps and other error from your customers automatically. As I recall this is a free service, no reason not to use it.

Since WinQual will likely take a while for the crash dump to get to you, and it is always nice to be a little more responsive to customers especially when you application crashes, use [Dr. Watson](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308538). As I recall when the crash occurs, before clicking on the dialog you can run **drwatsn32** from Start->Run or the command line and Dr Watson will pop up. At this point dismissing the crash dialog will generate a crash dump file. Should this fail, install Dr Watson by running it with the **-i** parameter on the command line.