GFlags.exe and Pageheap

I was tracking down a heap corruption today, and it occurred to me that I haven't mentioned how to enable pageheap.  For instance, when you use the handy "!heap -traige", if there was a heap corruption, sometimes it will tell to try the repro again with pageheap enabled.  How do you do that?

There are actually several ways to enable pageheap, but I will only talk about one, modifying the global flags using gflags.exe.  It should get installed when you install windbg.

Basically for a user mode (UM) process, you go to the image file tab, and type in the name of your exe.  If you run in a svchost.exe, then you should probably break out your service to a uniquely named servicehost.exe.  I use myhost.exe normally for debugging a service.  After that, check "Enable page heap."

Next, you need to run the code in question under  the debugger, and then you reproduce the heap corruption.  Normally the debugger will break in This time you will be able to get a lot more useful information out of !heap and !analyze.