And YOUR weirdest Windows glitch was ____ ?? (Crashdump)

[Seeker47]

I had one of those cliff-edge moments yesterday -- computer variety -- and wondered if anyone else has seen something like this ? I'm running XP.

Available space on the boot partition abruptly plummeted to zero. Windows warnings about low disk space ensued. What had happened to the 14.9G of free space ? I was very reluctant to shut down, out of concern that I would then be unable to reboot the system. Gotta find out what's going on here, and hopefully correct it, first. O.K., what might have happened recently that seemed strange ? The I.E. Tab extension in FireFox had crashed, with FF being hung for awhile as a result. But I managed to exit FF, and that probably wasn't it. I scanned C:, looking for any very large file having today's date. Aha -- there's a Crashdump file of around 14G. in size; mystery at least partially solved. (But there was never any sign of a System Crash, or any related error message, other than the one about low disk space.) So I tried to delete the file: not the "delete" most Windows users do, which just sends the deleted file to your Recycle Bin, but a bona fide eliminate it immediately DELETE. Can't do it: Sharing Violation.

Next question: what owns this ******* file ? Well, it resided in \Documents and Settings\Application Data\VLC, which seemed pretty conclusive to me. I had closed VLC as much as an hour earlier. No doubt about that -- fully exited the program. But when I looked in Taskmanager, there was VLC, very much still alive. After killing its process, I was then able to delete that crashdump file, and have the boot partition operating normally again.

In case it matters, I'm still using VLC 1.05. It almost never does anything unexpected. I just opened and closed it several times in succession, as a random test, and it does not linger on in Taskmanager.

Fortunately, I don't recall seeing this type of incident before. So, what's your most bizarre Windows event ?

[Seeker47]

It just happened for the second time . . . but I just did a Google search, and this sounds like it may be the answer:

http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/3873

So, not really a Windows issue, just a bug in an app revealing itself. (Why only now though, after months of using this version of VLC ?) I may have no choice but to uninstall this VLC, in favor of a much more recent version.

If someone knows of some obscure setting by which you can force XP to limit crashdumps it will accept from any app to a reasonable size, please enlighten me. A quick Google search for that has not turned up anything useful.