Roberto M Franco

US Patent:

20060005078, Jan 5, 2006

Filed:

Jun 30, 2004

Appl. No.:

10/880819

Inventors:

Quji Guo - Stanford CA, US
Roberto Franco - Seattle WA, US
Edward Praitis - Woodinville WA, US
Li-Hsin Huang - Bellevue WA, US
Jingyang Xu - Redmond WA, US
Brian Wentz - Seattle WA, US
Julian Jiggins - Seattle WA, US
Venkatavaradhan Panchapagesan - Redmond WA, US

Assignee:

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

International Classification:

G06F 11/00

US Classification:

714038000

Abstract:

The present invention is generally directed to improving the stability of computing devices by identifying plug-in modules and other programs that cause failures. More specifically, the present invention provides a method that traces program execution from an instruction that ultimately generated a failure to a code library that caused the failure generating instruction to be executed. The method traces execution of the computing device by obtaining the contents of memory at the time of the failure and traversing the stack data structure that stores data items necessary to execute function calls.