How Can I Debug Access Violations When Running My Program Outside the Debugger?

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2015. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

Problem Description
My program runs fine in the Visual Studio environment, but when I run it stand-alone with the Windows operating system, it produces an access violation. How can I debug this problem?

Solution

Set the Just-in-time debugging option and run your program stand-alone until the access violation occurs. Then, in the Access Violation dialog box, you can click Cancel to start the debugger.

Also see the Knowledge Base article Q133174, "How to Locate Where a General Protection (GP) Fault Occurs." You can find Knowledge Base articles on the MSDN Library CD or by searching https://support.microsoft.com/.

See Also

Debugging Native Code FAQs
Debugging Native Code