any way to trace a program crash?

[mcveigh]

At the hospital I work at we have a program for sleep studies, it basically takes your bodies electrical signals through an amp into the computer to record and display it.
we have 2 versions of it.
On our old P4 machines it works fine, but a couple years ago we got 4 new computers with the newer version of the software. these crash about 1-2x a week. (just the program crashes)

the program freezes on the screen but you don't get an error message till you move the mouse or touch the keyboard.

is there a way to trace why a program crashes? maybe some 3rd party software that could monitor it?

So far our IT dept and the manufacturer haven't been able to help.
thanks

 

[CalvinHobbes]

Is it generating an application error or just shutting down? You can get crash dumps through the OS and then analyze what's in dump to try and trace the cause. Giving the dump to whoever wrote the application should allow them to find the problem.

 

[mcveigh]

it justs shuts down, which is weird to me.

 

[Pwnbroker]

You may be able to get some info from Windows Event Viewer, which is in Administrative tools in the Control Panel, provided you are using Windows that is....