WerTweak

WerTweak improves the crash reports of Windows Error Reporting (WER) on Windows 10 and 11. WER is the component in Windows that is responsible for handling application crashes. Starting with Windows 10, WER has undergone some changes, most notably:

• When a process has crashed, WER now handles the crash by default in a completely silent way. The crashed process is simply terminated immediately without letting the user know what went wrong. This behavior can be disabled if you set WER's DontShowUI setting to 0, either via Group Policy or manually in the registry.

• Even with DontShowUI set to 0, WER will never show crash reports for some specific processes. For example, background processes without any user interface still crash silently. Another example is the explorer.exe process, which is always restarted automatically by WER when it has crashed.

• When WER notifies the user of a crash, it does so using a dialog containing only the name of the crashed process. This dialog lacks more detailed information, such as the exact type of crash, the faulting module name, the exception code etc. (example).

While these changes might seem acceptable for average Windows users, they are usually not wanted by power users and software developers, who will want to be notified instantly when a process crashes, with a crash report that contains detailed information.

That is where WerTweak comes in. WerTweak is a system tool that hooks itself into WER and modifies its behavior as follows:

• WerTweak forces WER to notify the user of all crashes, even if they occur in invisible background processes. Furthermore, it unsets certain internal flags set by WER in case a 'special' process (such as explorer.exe) crashes, so that these crashes are also reported to the user.

• With WerTweak installed, WER displays the same old-style crash reporting dialog as in previous versions of Windows, meaning that detailed crash information is shown again (example).

Obtaining the source code

First make sure that you have a recent version of the Git client (git) installed. Then open a Windows command prompt window (note: Git Bash isn't supported). In the command prompt, run these commands:

> git clone https://github.com/tdebaets/wertweak.git wertweak
> cd wertweak

Finally, run the postclone.bat script. This will take care of further setting up the repository, installing Git hooks, creating output directories etc.:

> postclone.bat

To keep your repository up-to-date, run the update.bat script. This script essentially runs a git pull but also performs some basic checks before pulling. It also runs a git submodule update after the pull to update the common submodule as well.

If you want to contribute to this project, don't clone its main repository, but create your own fork first and clone that fork instead. Then commit/push your work on a topic branch and submit a pull request. For details, see the generic instructions for contributing to projects.

Building

WerTweak has been written in C++ using Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2019. This means that in order to build this project, you'll need to have Visual Studio 2019 installed. Other releases of Visual Studio may also work but are unsupported.

Installing

After having built WerTweak, you can manually install it by making an addition to the registry (there's no automatic installer script yet). The exact instructions vary slightly depending on whether you’re running 64-bit or 32-bit Windows:

• 64-bit Windows

  Navigate to either the Output\x64\Release or Output\x64\Debug subdirectory of the repository, depending on which build configuration you want to use. Make sure that these 3 files exist in this subdirectory: WerTweak.dll, WerTweak64.dll and WerTweak64.exe. Then add the following entry to the registry:

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\WerFault.exe

  Value name: Debugger

  Value data type: REG_SZ

  Value data: <Full path of WerTweak64.exe file>

• 32-bit Windows

  Navigate to either the Output\Release or Output\Debug subdirectory of the repository, depending on which build configuration you want to use. Make sure that these 2 files exist in this subdirectory: WerTweak.dll and WerTweak.exe. Then add the following entry to the registry:

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\WerFault.exe

  Value name: Debugger

  Value data type: REG_SZ

  Value data: <Full path of WerTweak.exe file>

License

WerTweak is Copyright © 2020-2024 Tim De Baets. It is licensed under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0, see LICENSE for details.