troubleshoot freezing process WINWORD using windbg

Question

• Background info:

A few users in our network reported hanging of the WINWORD process as soon as they try to save a Word (2010) file after editting the document. Since they are working on a Citrix environment simply reinstalling Office isn't an easy option. Since nothing showed up in the procmon captures i tried reading the WINWORD dump file.

• Problem:

As soon as i try to open the dump file in windbg i get an symlink missing error (mso.pdb). Downloading all pdb's using symchk /r didn't get me the missing mso.pdb either. From what i understand Microsoft doesn't share Office PDB's. Can anybody advise me on how to proceed from here?

I'm not looking for someone to solve my problem, simple pointing me in a direction would help me out already.

Answer 1

I would recommend starting with either Process Explorer or Process Hacker. Make sure your Debugging Symbols are configured properly in the tool before doing this.

Using one of these 2 tools, double click the WINWORD.EXE when it's hanging, and then click on Threads. See which thread it's hanging on. You can also double click that Thread to view the Call Stack to help diagnose where the hang is happening. Lastly, check the Loaded Modules to see if anything unusual is getting loaded during the hang.

You can also try watching PE/PH while performing the problem scenario to observe its red/green highlighting that shows when new threads are created, new modules loaded, etc. Make sure to set the options for Difference Highlighting to the max 9000ms. (9 seconds).

Microsoft also has crash/hang analyzing tools like ADPlus.VBS which comes with Debugging Tools for Windows. There's another one but I'm forgetting the name of it right now.

And consider creating a real Stack Exchange account instead of this silly Bugmenot one.