How to Eliminate Dr. Watson

After getting fed up with Dr. Watson errors everytime a users Netscape session would hit a rogue Java Page I set out on a search to eliminate him totally from my life. It is interesting that MS has even had to include an Application Compatibilty Script with Terminal Server to get it's own Bug Checker to work with it! I have read documentation in the Microsoft knowledge base that states more than one instance of Dr. Watson on a server can crash the server. If you have 30 users running netscape on a server it only takes two to hit a rogue page. Once the Dr. Watson is running you generally cant kill the process either which makes it that much more fun. You have to reboot to kill it.

So for all of you to benefit from my several hours of searching the knowledge base, technet and the net to find a solution here is how to kill Dr. Watson.

Remember to do an rdisk before doing any registry edits, and yada yada yada, all disclaimers apply.

Run regedt32 on your server: go to: hkey_local_machine-Software-Microsoft-Windows NT-Current Version-Aedebug Click on and edit the debugger value delete the text in the popup box referring to drwatson followed by some values which should look something like this drwatson32 -p %ld -e %ld -g. Click on OK and Dr. Watson is Dead! Another thing you can do if you dont want to totally eliminate Dr. Watson is go to: hkey_local_machine-Software-Microsoft-DrWatson and set the value under VisualNotification from 1 to 0 This will suppress the popup error messages users see and only write to the log.

When there is an error now we get a fatal exception error and the user is kicked out of the failing app when they click ok on the error box but they can restart the app and pick up where they left off instead of locking the entire server up and every one is down.

If you are registry gunshy you could do the following to disable Dr. Watson from coming up.

From the NT start menu Run command, type in: drwtsn32.exe
Clear all check marks from Options boxes.
This will disable Dr. Watson from running.

To reenable Dr. Watson type drwtsn -i in the run box.

Disclaimer: This information is supplied as is and is intended for information purposes only. Use this information at your own risk. The internet can often contain false or misleading information. While this is generally not the case with my personal documents I have to put this text here for legal purposes.