Problem with gwes.exe

[killerboy]

I am using a Windows Mobile Pocket PC. I recently upgraded it but I keep having a problem. Sometime I get a message that says "A problem has occurred with gwes.exe", while other times it just says gwes.exe is not responding. What is it? Can anyone help me with this issue?

[Pugsly]

Do you see a fairly consistent failure? The gwes.exe error is likely an issue with the application you are writing, passing in invalid pointers to system api's which occasionally manifest itself as a gwes.exe error.

Do you see this while running in the emulator? You may want to attach to your application to see what it is doing at the time that this happens and hopefully that will give you an indication of what went wrong.

If you run your application under the debugger, their may be pertinent information in the debug output window to help you out as well.

[Simond]

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.

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 to Windows Error Reporting database.

If GWES didn’t handled exceptions that were thrown from your WndProc, then any crashing WndProc would crash GWES without fail and take down the entire system. GWES handles exceptions thrown out of other WndProcs. So GWES is responsible for triggering a Watson dump when another program crashes in a WndProc.

In short, it is possible that GWES really is crashing for some reason. So please keep sending those error reports to Windows.

[Regina]

Gwes is a system process. I do not know why you get the memory leak, but I don't. I always thought spb pocketplus is the culprit, but someone just claimed he had no leaks while using spb+. But give this a try if you happen to use it...