What is GWES.exe and why does it crash?

[mikeylive]

Originally Posted by Adster

I now got a brand new shiney replacement phone!

but I'm still getting the gwes.exe error on boot...this time I installed less things:

I sync'd contacts, installed Resco Explorer, deleted poutlook from Start..

BOOM: gwes.exe error.

Any solutions? I'm going to play with it for a little bit to see what I can find. Since the Palm App isn't installed, it can't be that.

Small world! I have a winey roommate that is having the same problem with his Treo 700 WX. He's a real loser though. He's kind of a tool, too! Oh well. Hopefully he'll never find out that I'm sleeping with his girlfriend...

[Adster]

Originally Posted by mikeylive

Small world! I have a winey roommate that is having the same problem with his Treo 700 WX. He's a real loser though. He's kind of a tool, too! Oh well. Hopefully he'll never find out that I'm sleeping with his girlfriend...

You forget...I know where you sleep, and you can't charge your Treo without power in your room. I'm closet to the breaker box then you are my friend.

By the way, I found out that the problem was a corrupted version of Resco Explorer. I kept installing it from the CAB file. Now, I instatalled it form the EXE and it's working just fine!

[Pibe38]

Ok, so I know this thread is old, however, I found this article on the Windows Mobile Team's blog about what GWES is and why it crashes... so I figured it would be beneficial to have it here in case anyone runs a search for it!!!

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/...ologizing.aspx

Who is GWES and why does it keep apologizing?

I?ve seen this question a few times on the newsgroup so I thought I?d take a stab at it. We?re having another freak winter storm in Redmond so it?s not like I can leave work anyway?

What is GWES?

Gwes is the Graphical Windowing and Event Subsystem. It?s one little program that draws all the controls on the device like scrollbars, buttons, and checkboxes. It also handles passing window messages back and forth between applications and manages the WndProcs of all of the programs on the device that are displaying UI.

So why does it crash all the time?

A crash dump (?Watson dump?) is usually triggered by an unhandled exception in a program. It packages up a callstack and some diagnostics and queues it for transmission up to our Windows Error Reporting database.

If a program (let?s call it test.exe) crashes inside WinMain, the exception gets out to the unhandled exception trap in the kernel which creates the Watson dump and then terminates test.exe.

But what if test.exe crashes inside its WndProc? The exception travels up the callstack. The next process up the callstack is GWES ? GWES is the process that calls each WndProc in the first place, because it?s marshalling the window messages throughout the system.

What if GWES didn?t handle exceptions that were thrown from your WndProc? Then any crashing WndProc would crash GWES without fail and take down the entire system. That doesn?t happen, so we know that?s not true. GWES handles exceptions thrown out of other WndProcs. So GWES is responsible for triggering a Watson dump when another program crashes in a WndProc.

The problem is that when the Watson dump is created, it sees that GWES is at the top of the callstack, so GWES gets the place of honor in the Watson UI that you see in the screenshot above. We have fixed this for future versions of the system - crashes inside a WndProc will show the correct process name in the "We're Sorry..." UI.

Sometimes it really is just sorry.

That said, it is possible that GWES really is crashing for some reason. So please keep sending those error reports up to us. We use them to diagnose problems and prioritize fixes towards the crashes that customers are hitting the most often.