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Hi, what exactly is dr.watson (drwtsn.exe) ? because it is essentially at the moment stopping any new games i buy from loading. I think when it runs it then somehow prevents the game, what ever game it may be, from loading up. Quite a weird problem.

Thanks, Dayus.

Dr Watson, executable name drwtsn32.exe and another called drwatson.exe are system debuggers. You would not normally have either of them running. Their purpose is to keep watch on the system, waiting for system errors to occur, at which point they make a logfile of use to technical people only.

I am not sure if it you are running a gane which tries to execute illegal instructions or the like, and Dr Watson is triggered by the game, so that the authors can find out what went wrong. It can be controlled such that it does not start see here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/188296 but personally, it does seem the game you are trying to play is hardly likely to be well-behaved.

Dr Warson is not a service which can be switched on or off from services.msc, and I think the intention is you start it manually when you come across a repeatable faulty peice of software, and then pass the resulting logs to the developers.

Oh, so it's a information gathering tool. It, strangely however, does seem to be what is causing the probs, it seems the act of it running is what shuts down the game, no matter what game it may be, admittedly i have only had the chance to test it on 3 games at present. All the games are perfectly legal. At first i thought it might be that fact that windows was not up-to-date, so i updated to sp3, but it made no difference. Drivers are up-to-date aswell.