Find an Event in the Event Viewer (Windows XP)

At MetaGeek, we strive for total reliability in our tools, but sometimes things go wrong. If the software crashes right when you try to start it, we may need to check the Event Viewer to find out what happened.

Windows XP Support

Note: As of April 8, 2014, Microsoft has support for Windows XP has ended. Windows XP will no longer receive security updates, which makes it extremely vulnerable from a security standpoint.

MetaGeek will continue to provide XP support in most products for a limited time, but we strongly recommend upgrading to a Microsoft-supported version of Windows as soon as possible.

Find an Event in the Event Viewer in Windows XP

1. Recreate the problem that causes the software to crash. If we've referred you to this article, you probably just need to try to launch the program that keeps crashing.

2. Open the Start Menu and select Control Panel.

3. In the Control Panel, switch to Classic View (if you haven't already).

4. In Control Panel, double-click the Administrative Tools icon.

5. Double-click the Event Viewer icon.

6. After Event Viewer has opened, select the Application group.

7. In the Application frame in the middle, find the record of the crash, and click on it to highlight it.

Note: You should see a red x icon wherever something crashed. Crash data usually comes in pairs. While the ".NET Runtime" crash is generally less useful, if you can both sets of crash data for us...

8. Right-click on the event, and select Properties from the pop-up menu.

Note: We've selected the less useful ".NET Runtime" crash here.

9. In the Event Properties window, click on the Copy to Clipboard button.

10. Now that the text from the Event Properties is on your clipboard, paste it into Notepad. You can find Notepad in Start > All Programs > Accessories. When you have finished pasting the error message in, save the text file and email it to us.