You might be a careful person who regularly scan computer for viruses, check for windows updates, clear temporary files, defrag hard drive and also making sure that your startup item is not loaded with programs. Suddenly, you noticed that there is a new startup item KernelFaultCheck with the command dumprep 0 -u or dumprep 0 -k in System Configuration Utility (MSCONFIG).

Is dumprep.exe a virus and how did it get into into my startup programs? Why even after removing dumprep.exe from startup, it comes back automatically? Continue reading to know what is dumprep.exe and how to permanently removing it from startup.


The explanation below is taken from Microsoft’s website.

The Dumprep.exe tool is a Windows XP fault logging program. If a serious error occurs, Dumprep.exe writes the error details to a text file. The Dumprep.exe tool then prompts you to send the error information to Microsoft. The Dumprep.exe tool is a non-essential system process that is installed for third-party use.

There usually 2 switches. -k is a kernel fault check and -u is a user fault check. Since Microsoft mentioned that dumprep.exe is a non-essential system process, we can disable it. To disable dumprep.exe from startup, to Control Panel > System > Advanced tab > click Settings button for Startup and Recovery. At write debugging information, click the drop down menu, select (none) and click OK.

Next, click the Error Reporting button, and select “Disable error reporting“. You can leave the option “But notify me when critical errors occur” checked. Click OK to close Error Reporting window.

Go to Run and type msconfig. Check if dumprep.exe still exist in the list or not. If it is there, run regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Select KernelFaultCheck name and hit delete. Restart your computer. If you don’t want to mess with registry, you can use HijackThis to remove it. Just do a system scan, check on %systemroot%\system32\dumprep.exe and click Fix checked.

If dumprep.exe still automatically added into startup after disabling error reporting and writing debugging information, that means your computer has experienced blue screen and memory dump before. You need to Search for MEMORY.DMP file and delete it. Usually the MEMORY.DMP file is located at Windows folder. Once you delete the dump file from Windows, VOILA! dumprep.exe will no longer appear in MSCONFIG.