Many times when running perl on Windows, I've seen a hard crash or segfault that pops up a dialog box with the dreaded text 

perl.exe has encountered an error and needs to close

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and everything comes to a halt until I press the button to close the dialog.

I wrote about one trigger for this in Perl 5.8 in Tainted fork crash on Win32, but it has happened in other circumstances as well when some XS module or other does something it's not supposed to.

This behavior is really annoying if I'm running some sort of batch process where I can handle sub-process failures as long as they actually finish failing and return an error value.

Fortunately, I recently found a workaround that suppresses the dialog box: KB#124873: Disabling System Hard Error Message Dialog Boxes. On WinXP, at least, it requires setting the following registry key to "2":

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows\ErrorMode

While that's a global change, I believe there's also a way to set this for a process and its children using the Win32 function SetErrorMode.

I haven't tried it and I don't think any current CPAN module offers an interface to this, but it wouldn't be hard to do with Win32::API.

use Win32::API;
Win32::API->Import( 'kernel32' => 'int SetErrorMode(int a)' );
SetErrorMode(2)

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I hope this helps some other annoyed monks out there.

-xdg

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