If you have reported a problem with your browser and we cannot reproduce it at Activeworlds Corp., someone from Activeworlds Corp. may ask you to "send us a debug log of the problem."

A debug log is a file that the Active Worlds Browser can generate, giving step-by-step details of every operation it performs while running. Sometimes, the information in this log can provide clues as to what might be causing your problem.

To have your browser generate a debug log, first exit Active Worlds if your are currently running it. Then, locate the file aworld.ini in your Active Worlds home directory (usually "C:\Active Worlds" unless you specified a different directory at the time you installed the browser.) Open this file in a text editor such as notepad.

At the very top of this file, add the following two lines:

[debug]
all=1


Save your changes and exit the text editor. Then restart Active Worlds. You will probably notice that the browser is now running quite a bit slower than before. This is because it is busy writing information to the debug log as it is running.

The debug log grows in size extremely quickly. Thus, it is now imperitive that you reproduce your problem as quickly as possible. If your problem is a crash bug, you should do whatever it takes to reproduce the crash as quickly as possible.

If your browser crashes, press OK on the crash message dialog box and let it exit. If the problem is a lock up, you may have to kill it by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete. If your problem does not involve a crash, try to reproduce it as quickly as possible, and then exit the browser.

After the crash, or after you exit the browser, there will be a large file in your Active Worlds folder called aworld.log. This is the file we want. Because it is so large, you should first compress the file using a utility such as WinZip, if you have one. Once you have compressed the file, return it as an email attachment to the person who asked for it.

As a final important step, you must now remove those two lines from your aworld.ini file. If you don't, your browser will continue to generate giant debug logs whenever your run it, greatly reducing your performance. So, locate aworld.ini again, open it in a text editor, and delete those two lines from the top of the file.

Note that sending in a debug log doesn't guarantee that we'll be able to fix your problem. But it does greatly increase our chances of figuring out what is going wrong.