DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How

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re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Justin — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 00:04:49 GMT

Thanks for this article... In my WCF services when exceptions are thrown the app pool the services are running in shuts down and it kicks off 2-5 of these dreaded DW20.exe's, all of which spike the CPU and use up 100-200 megs of ram each...

Especially when running in a Virtual PC this is a big ouch!! Hoping that disabling it will do the trick for me...

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

rahulso — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 00:11:40 GMT

Sure Justin!

Just wanted to let you know that if you still see crashes you may like to debug it using Debug Diagnostics as per http://blogs.msdn.com/rahulso/archive/2006/03/02/what-is-a-crash-technically-in-asp-net-and-what-to-do-if-it-happens.aspx!

-Rahul

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Arati Rahalkar — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:50:40 GMT

I have gone through some of your blogs. And this one in particular interests me because we are facing this weird problem that I am unable to understand.

We have a ASP .NET 2.0 web application, using ASP .NET Ajax Extensions, installed on Windows Server 2003 + IIS 6.0. As soon as I load the Login page of this application (just visit the page URL, do not actually log into the application), w3wp.exe shoots up to 100% of CPU usage. I am not able to figure out why? All that is happening are the dlls getting loaded.

Most of the posts related to that say that this will happen because of some infinite loop. But I don't think there is any infinit loop anywhere in our application's DLL.

Have you seen such a situation? Can you provide some helpful links? Anything on this front will be great!

Thanks in advance,

Arati

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

rahulso — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:39:57 GMT

Hi Arati,

High CPU can be caused due to quite a lot of reasons, and infinite loops are just one of them.

The best way to go about is to take a few hang dumps when the CPU is at 100% and analyze the dumps to see where the problem resides.

I would suggest to open a new MS ticket to get the issue resolved, since the analysis will require you to capture those dumps and send it over to us for analysis. You can use Debug Diagnostics Tool as well and try to solve it yourself.

Debug Diagnostics - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9BFA49BC-376B-4A54-95AA-73C9156706E7&displaylang=en

MS Support Incident -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;offerprophone&sd=msdn#faq607

Hope that helps.

Rahul

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Arati Rahalkar — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 09:55:30 GMT

Hi Rahul

Thanks for a prompt reply. I used IIS State (from IIS 6.0 Resource Toolkit) and from the IIS dump saw that one particular thread in our application was taking up a lot of time. After cleaning up that class, things seem to work fine now.

Thanks for the help,

Arati

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

rahulso — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 05:22:42 GMT

No problem Arati and thanks for the update :-)It is great to know that everything is working fine now.

Enjoy!

Rahul

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

eGrantsGuy — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:11:58 GMT

Hi Rahul,

This blog sheds light on the application crash problem we are having. Our environment: ASP.NET 1.1, IIS 6.0, Windows Server 2003. We ran IIS Diagnostics tool and tried to analyze the reports. I'm posting the highlights of the report

1. In w3wp__PID__2308__Date__07_11_2007__Time_03_03_51PM__317__First chance exception 0XE0434F4D.dmp the assembly instruction at kernel32!RaiseException+53 in C:\WINDOWS\system32\kernel32.dll from Microsoft Corporation has caused an unknown exception (0xe0434f4d) on thread 15

2.MSHTML!PLAINRELEASE+8BIn w3wp__PID__2308__Date__07_11_2007__Time_03_14_08PM__47__Second_Chance_Exception_C0000005.dmp the assembly instruction at mshtml!PlainRelease+8b in C:\WINDOWS\system32\mshtml.dll from Microsoft Corporation has caused an access violation exception (0xC0000005) when trying to read from memory location 0x11ac0624 on thread 52

Any information to help resolve this issue is greatly appreciated.

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

rahulso — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 23:35:59 GMT

Hello eGrantsguy,

Looking at this, I was quite surprised to see MSHTML being there in your w3wp.exe. Are you automating IE objects??

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

eGrantsGuy — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:55:29 GMT

Hi Rahul,

We are not directly automating IE objects. We use ABCPdf.NET to dynamically generate PDFs from URLs. Don't know if it is automating.

Here is IIS dump which points to ABCPdf.NET

Thread 52 - System ID 5668

Entry point ABCpdfCE6!NTransform_Skew+c7ba0

Create time 7/11/2007 3:14:01 PM

Time spent in user mode 0 Days 0:0:3.156

Time spent in kernel mode 0 Days 0:0:0.156

Function Arg 1 Arg 2 Arg 3 Source

mshtml!PlainRelease+8b 11ac0620 00000000 11feff80

ABCpdfCE6!NTransform_Skew+cc165 00000000 00000000 00000000

MSHTML!PLAINRELEASE+8BIn w3wp__PID__2308__Date__07_11_2007__Time_03_14_08PM__47__Second_Chance_Exception_C0000005.dmp the assembly instruction at mshtml!PlainRelease+8b in C:\WINDOWS\system32\mshtml.dll from Microsoft Corporation has caused an access violation exception (0xC0000005) when trying to read from memory location 0x11ac0624 on thread 52

Module Information

Image Name: C:\WINDOWS\system32\mshtml.dll Symbol Type: PDB

Base address: 0x7d0e0000 Time Stamp: Fri May 06 21:19:07 2005

Checksum: 0x00304d9c Comments:

COM DLL: True Company Name: Microsoft Corporation

ISAPIExtension: False File Description: Microsoft (R) HTML Viewer

ISAPIFilter: False File Version: 6.00.3790.2440 (srv03_sp1_gdr.050506-1520)

Managed DLL: False Internal Name: MSHTML

Loaded Image Name: mshtml.dll Legal Trademarks:

Mapped Image Name: Original filename: MSHTML.DLL

Module name: mshtml Private Build:

Single Threaded: False Product Name: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System

Module Size: 2.98 MBytes Product Version: 6.00.3790.2440

Symbol File Name: c:\symcache\mshtml.pdb\3FCBFD7777A3457B8AB2DFE3AE6F50212\mshtml.pdb Special Build: &

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

rahulso — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:58:27 GMT

It seems like something caused by ABCpdfCE6 which in turn is trying to do something with mshtml.dll.

Since it is something non-microsoft related (http://support.microsoft.com/dllhelp/?dlltype=file&l=55&alpha=ABCpdfCE6.dll&S=1), I can only suggest to get the latest version of the ABCpdfCE6.dll and check out if the issue gets corrected.

Thanks,

Rahul

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Brian — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:24:06 GMT

Thank you for posting this article.

We were having this issue on our Symantec Enterprise Vault - File System Archiving server and this stopped the dw20.exe from occuring after we rebooted.

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

rahulso — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:06:34 GMT

I am glad to know Brian!

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Constantin BACIU — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:39:27 GMT

Well... this seems to be a good answer to my DW20 hanging problems.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me.

"my" DW20 process is fired by a devenv.com that I run to automatically build some of my projects. Up until just a few hours ago, everything was just dandy. (and it's been up and running for almost one year).

Now, the DW20 process shows up on the same build over and over again. I really don't know what else I can do to make it dissapear.

Any suggestions?

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Constantin BACIU — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:39:56 GMT

Well... this seems to be a good answer to my DW20 hanging problems.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me.

Now, the DW20 process shows up on the same build over and over again. I really don't know what else I can do to make it dissapear.

Any suggestions?

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Steven Craft — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:15:11 GMT

I have the same issue as BACIU - anyone else experienced this and no of a way to stop devenv from firing up DW20? I've numerous things including deleting a bunch of registry entries, following the steps above, rebooting etc. but devenv still manages to fire up DW20 and then sit there in a hung state for ever more, killing out automated build system.

Steve

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

rahulso — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:42:42 GMT

Hello Baciu & Steven,

Sorry for the late response.

Did you try renaming...

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\DW\DW20.exe

I am not recommending this for ever. I just wanted to see if renaming this key stops the spawning of DW20.exe.

Rahul

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

rahulso — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:44:13 GMT

in fact... searching your machine for DW20.exe would be a better idea. Do NOT delete this file. For the time being, please try renaming and see if it helps.

Even if it doesn't help, the problem would come on surface (maybe some kind of crash or something unexpected that is kicking this guy in).

Renaming DW20.exe should get us a bit closer to the real bad guy.

Thanks,

Rahul

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Mikael — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:20:57 GMT

Great articel, but how do you disable it in win 2008 server.

Cant find the Error reporing option under system properties.

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Danny — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:44:28 GMT

renaming DW20.exe worked for me (when all other attempts failed)

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Steven Craft — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:27:59 GMT

In the end I wrote a service that just sits in the background and refreshes a list of processes currently running on the machine every 5 seconds, if it ever detects DW20.EXE it adds it to a 'to be killed list' if 5 seconds later the process is still there it kills it - simple as! It also writes some information to the application log so I can see when it's kicked in.

This has been running on multiple machines for sometime now and has 'fixed' all problems with DW20.EXE for us. The application log shows that it has to kick in multiple times per day.

Be a lot nicer if Visual Studio 2005 wasn't a hunk of junk that crashes all the time when there are multiple instances of it building on the machine simultaneously. Still, can't hope for miracles!

Steve

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

rahulso — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:04:49 GMT

Hello Steve,

I was thinking why not just rename DW20.exe?

Hohe CPU-Last in Virtueller Maschine

Meine SharePoint-Notizen — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:26:22 GMT

Nachdem es mir nun schon zum wiederholten Male passiert ist denke ich, man könnte mal eine kurze Blog

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Bill Halvorson — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:52:04 GMT

Thanks, that was great. I knew from past experience that Dr. Watson was a useless piece of software, and have had so many problems with it killing my computer. Previously my only option was to remove that executable so that it wouldn't run. Now I have a more permanent solution.

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Moby Disk — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:24:36 GMT

Thanks so much! I didn't know about this screen. I used regmon to determine the registry keys set if you disable error reporting and uncheck "but notify me"

They are:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PCHealth\ErrorReporting\AllOrNone = 1

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PCHealth\ErrorReporting\ShowUI = 0

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PCHealth\ErrorReporting\DoReport = 0

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PCHealth\ErrorReporting\IncludeKernelFaults = 1

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

Subbu — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:33:24 GMT

Awesome, dude. A simple and clear solution instead of all the high-tech and risky registry manipulations. Keep up the good work!

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

JimZ — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:18:20 GMT

Just a side note on eGrantsGuy's post:

His IIS Diagnostics reference exception 0xe0434f4d. According to this msdn blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/junfeng/archive/2007/07/16/unknown-exception-0xe0434f4e.aspx which says (quote):

#define EXCEPTION_HIJACK 0xe0434f4e // 0xe0000000 | 'COM'+1

EXCEPTION_HIJACK is thrown by CLR as part of the process of suspending threads for garbage collection. It's raised to help resume execution after a suspension.

Apparently, from the rest of the dump, ABCPdf.NET attempted to access data that was garbage collected.

re: DW20.exe was stopping us from taking the Crash Dumps in w3wp.exe! How to disable it?

William — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:48:24 GMT

Thanks for the info. I just installed Windows Home Server at home, tho I have no experience with Windows Server 2003. I've been remoting into the server box and looking at tasks that are running and happened to see DW20.exe taking 50% of the CPU. I just turned on the Customer Improvement Program option and I wonder if DW20.exe running was something that's tied to that action. Anyway, now I know what I can do if DW20.exe presents a problem fr me. Thanks again!