Suppress message: "python.exe has stopped working"

Question

I'm running Python 2.7 with ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 on Windows for Server (2 Xeon 2.13 Ghz processors).

Is it possible to suppress or automatically close the dialogue box from Windows that says "python.exe has stopped working" when python crashes? I have a continuously running, multiprocessing script that sometimes crashes for unknown reasons (working on that). When I click to close the crash report window, the script restarts and everything is okay. I want this to happen automatically until I can track down what is causing the crashes.

Thanks very much! Doug

Answer 1

This is an simply an arcpy bug. You can try to avoid using the steps that are causing the crash, but it generally happens under different tools when used to process through a long list of data. The only workaround I have found is to make my script save its progress along the way to disk so if you restart the process, it knows where to pickup from. If you then disable windows debugger message by altering the registry (see below), you can then just repeatedly execute the script in cmd.exe until it completes the entire batch without having to close the process manually every time in between.

I know this is an awful workaround, but it is quite uncommon to have a python library kill off the python interpreter.

DWORD HKLM or HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\DontShowUI = "1"
DWORD HKLM or HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\Disabled = "1"

Answer 2

Procedure for disabling the Windows Debugger dialogue box found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb204634(v=vs.85).aspx

This prevents the debug dialogue box that requires the user to click [Debug] or [Cancel] if python crashes.

However, there is now another Windows dialogue box that says "python.exe has stopped working. Please close the program" with a button [Close Program]. Sheesh!

Answer 3

The dialog you refer to is part of Windows Error Reporting.

The exact method varies between editions of Windows (Windows 7 instructions here, Google will happily provide for other versions...), but if you disable this feature of Windows, your crashes will happen a lot faster(!).