Windows Application Experience service - could it be the cause of a crash?

Question

I am investigating a crash in an application (as a developer of the application). One of the things that happens at the time of the crash is that the Application Experience service starts.

I am wondering whether Windows loads this service once it detects a problem with an application in order for it to see whether there is a solution to recommend to the user; or whether the Application Experience service is a potential culprit.

The information that I've found (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/902196) suggests that the Application Experience service applies updates to applications in the background. If this is what it is doing, then I would say that it's a potential culprit.

Can anyone tell me whether this service is started in response to existing problems?

Solution 1

A better explanation of this service comes from BlackViper's website: "This service checks a Microsoft maintained database for known problems with popular programs and automatically enables workarounds, either at first installation (using UAC) or at application launch.

Older “non-Vista or Windows 7 compatible” programs may need this service running. Turning off this feature may increase over all application responsiveness at launch time (due to avoiding the database look up), however, it will not fix application installation issues."

In other words, it does tweaks to make sure older programs will run. This may involve launch settings, compatiblity settings or possibly update patches for some applications (I would question how often the latter is the case though).

Solution 2

From their Support website,

The Application Experience Lookup Service is a new service that was introduced in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This service is part of an infrastructure that automatically applies software updates to programs to make sure that they run on newly released service packs and newly released versions of the Windows operating system.

The Application Experience Lookup Service must be running for the software updates be applied. You cannot customize the Application Experience Lookup Service. This service is used by the operating system internally. This service does not use any Active Directory, network, or Internet resources.

The functionality of the Application Experience Lookup Service can be disabled though Group Policy settings for program compatibility. When this setting is disabled, the service will continue to run, but no calls will be made to the service. The service cannot be stopped or disabled.

Comments

[jrh]

There's a good explanation of what this service does on ServerFault: Windows Application Experience Service. From that post: "There is a huge database of compatibility shims for thousands of permutations of applications ... Microsoft might notice, based on their vast amount of collected telemetry data, that a million people are suffering from an application crash ... and Microsoft may develop an update or a new compatibility shim based on that info."

[jrh]

... based on that I would say that the service starting is in response to (not the cause of) the crash.

[Coder_Dan]

Thanks @sameetandpotatoes, that's from the page that I linked to. It does serve to emphasise however the fact that there is no way to customize this service. So if it was a culprit then there's nothing that we can do about it.

[sameetandpotatoes]

Yes. Sorry about that Coder_Dan, I forgot about your link.

[Elliot W]

This doesn't help to solve my problem, but like @Coder_Dan, I found that the Application Experience service was starting just after my app crash. So it is not the cause. What I found strange was that my app reconnects after the service stops.