How can I debug a win32 process that unexpectedly terminates silently?

Question

I have a Windows application written in C++ that occasionally evaporates. I use the word evaporate because there is nothing left behind: no \"we\'re sorry\" message from Window

Answer 1

All the other ideas posted are good.

But it also sounds like the application is calling abort() or terminate().

If you run it in the debugger set a breakpoint on both these methods and exit() just for good measure.

Here is a list of situations that will cause terminate to be called because of exceptions going wrong.

See also: Why destructor is not called on exception?

This shows that an application will terminate() if an exceptions is not caught. So stick a catch block in main() that reports the error (to a log file) then re-throw.

int main()
{
    try
    {
        // Do your code here.
    }
    catch(...)
    {
        // Log Error;
        throw;  // re-throw the error for the de-bugger.
    }
}