Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This option disables DUMPBIN’s highest level of exception handling.
No arguments are anticipated. The option is /xoff only.
The exception handler in question is the one that reports LNK1000 internal errors to standard output, citing a procedure and following with a dump of exception information and CPU context. The /xoff option disables this handler for all exception codes other than the two that support delayed-load imports.
This option is apparently undocumented. Its obvious merit is to help get information to Microsoft from users, perhaps programmers depending on Microsoft’s tools to help them with real work, who have the misfortune to encounter one of these LNK1000 internal errors. If the problem is reproducible, the user need simply re-run with this /xoff option added. Then, the exception is let through to the standard dialog box that gathers information about the fault, presumably in a form that Microsoft has designed to be most generally helpful, and which even offers to send this information to Microsoft.
To see this option in action, one needs to know of a coding error that is bad enough to cause a fault. The Internal error during DumpSymbolMap is arguably obscure, as most such coding errors surely are in Microsoft’s products, but makes for a good demonstration of /xoff since it seems likely to apply to a wide range of versions and therefore be accessible to a wide range of readers over a wide time. Try it with /xoff and without.