Great Plains Crashes

I recently experienced the worst of all possible scenarios for a consultant. I had a client that was experiencing crashes of Great Plain at random intervals that could not be reproduced with any combination of commands or operational sequences. Crashes could occur during posting, customer and/or vendor card lookups or with the Home page presented and no activity in Great Plains. The message presented was: “Microsoft Dynamics GP has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.” At that point, Great Plains would close and the user would be required to log back into the application to continue.

Working with Microsoft Support, we provided detailed information about the environment, versions, and other software installs. Due to the random nature of the problem, we could not use a DEXSQL.log as it could be running for days sometimes before a crash would occur. We removed Great Plains from the machine and re-installed, but the crashes continued. We installed Great Plains on a new computer workstation with IE and Microsoft Office, and the crashes continued. We removed all software from the new computer workstation and re-installed the operating system (XP) and Great Plains only. This seemed to stop the random crashes, but was a pain for the user as they had no internet access or use of applications such as Word or Excel. We tried adding back IE and Microsoft Office once more and the crashes resumed.

Microsoft Support then began looking at the Applications, Security and Event Logs. Review of these logs indicated error events occurring in conjunction with the Google Updater Service and the Windows Search Service. We manually turned off both of these services. At this point, the interruptions with Great Plains ceased. We subsequently added back the Windows Search Service without any return of interruptions. Microsoft Support indicated they had no history of the Google Updater Service causing Great Plains to crash, but for this customer, the Google Updater Service is not allowed to run.

If you want more information on the Google Updater Service, just Google it (sorry for the bad pun). The list returned from this search is long and interesting. I know if I ever see this error message again, the first thing I am going to try is to turn off the Google Updater Service.