If Logger Pro is crashing with a specific error message, check to see if the error message is listed here:
Logger Pro Troubleshooting and FAQs

Most Logger Pro startup related issues are caused by bad installations. As such, the first thing to try is uninstalling Logger Pro and reinstalling with our installer.

Also, make sure you are using the latest version. Some old versions of Logger Pro don’t work on new operating systems. You can find updaters here:
https://www.vernier.com/support/updates/logger-pro/
If you need a full installer for the latest version, you can access that from your account:
How do I access Logger Pro 3 installers and passwords from my account on the Vernier website?
You can also contact us.

If Logger Pro is crashing and it shows a dialog box with a button that says “Send Error Report to Vernier”, press that button and fill out the form with your name and email address. Note that those reports don’t always get analyzed immediately (unless you contact us and someone specifically reviews them), but they do contain detailed information about the crash, so, for diagnostic purposes, submitting that information is oftentimes helpful.

Certain antivirus software (depending on the settings) will sometimes cause problems with Logger Pro. When this is the root cause, the antivirus software generally displays an obvious message to this effect, but it is often useful to disable antivirus and launch Logger Pro to rule that out.

The next thing to try is other software that interacts with Logger Pro. Logger Pro interacts with several programs for various reasons:

• Bonjour (Apple mDNS software for data sharing)
• LabVIEW (It don’t interact with it, but some data-collection hardware use common libraries.)
• If you are running version 3.10.1 (or earlier): QuickTime

Even if you aren’t using those features of Logger Pro, if those pieces of software are on your computer and malfunctioning (which may not be obvious by running those programs directly), they can cause Logger Pro to malfunction.

Uninstalling and reinstalling those pieces of software often fixes the issue. QuickTime related issues are the most common, and it is the easiest to uninstall/reinstall. LabView related issues are very uncommon, and require the most work to uninstall/reinstall.

If that doesn’t work, then we’ll need some logs from Process Monitor. Process Monitor is a Microsoft tool that identifies whenever any program on Windows interacts with another program, loads a dll or data file, or even reads a registry key.

You can download Process Monitor here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

Unzip it and run it, and press OK to the default filters. It will start recording immediately. Launch Logger Pro, wait until it crashes, then go back into Process Monitor and click on the disk icon to save the file. The file will probably be huge (100+MB isn’t uncommon). Zip the file up though, and it will probably be much smaller, around 10MB. Exactly 10MB is the limit for most e-mail programs, so the log file may be too big to email, but you can upload it to Vernier’s file uploader. If you have slow upload bandwidth, compressing the file will help you email it much quicker.

Analyzing a Process Monitor log file is sometimes tricky. Different versions of Process Monitor exist and can’t read each others’ files, so it is generally best if everyone is using the latest version. Process Monitor generates very verbose log files, most of which are useless to what you need. Process Monitor does have good filtering choices though. You can type in the filter, but it is generally better to use the right-click menu. If, for instance, you notice that SearchIndexer.exe is running a lot (and probably isn’t a factor in the problems), you can right-click on “SearchIndexer.exe” and choose “Exclude SearchIndexer.exe”.

For various reasons, Logger Pro doesn’t always crash on the last listed line of LoggerPro.exe that you see in the log file, but that is typically where you should start looking for information. For instance, if Logger Pro is crashing just after opening QuickTime libraries, it is probably QuickTime related.

Common things you’ll see in Process Monitor

• svchost.exe: Everything that runs as a “Windows Service” runs as this. Unfortunately, excluding it sometimes means you’ll miss things.
• Logger Pro is looking in a bunch of different folders that don’t make sense. It does that when it starts up; it is finding things like fonts and device drivers. It doesn’t always know exactly where to look, so it searches files alphabetically.
• A lot of error messages such as “File locked with only readers”, “Unexpected End of File”, and “Buffer Overflow”. Many of those are normal (it may not need to write to the file, or it may be reading in chunks and reached the end of the file in the middle of a chunk or just want to check that the file is there and used a 1 byte buffer to read it). Obviously if Logger Pro isn’t launching then some of them are not normal. You may need to record your own log file of Logger Pro launching normally to compare against.
• The antivirus software is looking at LoggerPro.exe file (totally normal). Keep in mind that the antivirus exe’s name may not be obvious without performing a Google search.
• dwwin.exe or drwtsn32.exe: This is a Microsoft crash handler program. If you see that, Logger Pro has already crashed and Windows is cleaning it up. You will need to look higher in the log file for the root cause.

Note that “Tools” Menu>”System Details” will provide you with information, such as Windows version. This is sometimes helpful to check. You can right-click on line items within Process Monitor and choose Properties to learn more information about those items.

Process Monitor can be used for diagnosing other things besides crashes. For instance, font issues will show up in Process Monitor; it will list what files it tried to read; if the fonts weren’t there then it won’t be able to read them. If you know that it is a font issue, searching on “font” will make it obvious, it loaded those there. However, if you are searching thousands of lines in the log file to try to find something out of place, this could be difficult.

Windows: Why does Logger Pro hang, crash, or take several minutes to come up when I start it?

Why can't Logger Pro find QuickTime even after I've reinstalled it?