Mark Russinovich takes us along with him as he hunts an IE crash and teaching us how to fish along the way…

Mark's Blog - The Case of the Random IE Crash

“While I long for the day when I no longer experience the effects of buggy software, there’s something rewarding about solving my own troubleshooting cases. In the process, I often come up with new techniques to add to my bag of tricks and to share with you in my “Case of the Unexplained…” presentations and blog posts. The other day I successfully closed an especially interesting case that opened when Internet Explorer (IE) crashed as I was reading a web page:

Whenever I experience a crash, whether it’s the system or an application, I always take a look at it. There’s no guarantee, but many times after spending just a few minutes I find clues that point at an add-on as the cause and ultimately a fix or workaround. In most cases when it’s an application crash, the faulty process is obvious and I simply launch Windbg (from the free Debugging Tools for Windows package that comes with the Windows SDK and Windows DDK), attach it to the process, and start investigating.

Sometimes however, the faulting process isn’t obvious, like was the case when I saw the IE crash dialog. That’s because I was running IE8, which has a multi-process model where different tabs are hosted in different processes:

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Got to love Mark’s posts. The depth and detail and knowledge shared is powerful stuff. I wish I knew, and was able to apply, 1% of what he does…

(via ActiveWin - The Case of the Random IE Crash)