Skip to content →

Charles crashes

Crashes are fortunately unusual! There are a few things that might be causing it, or will help me diagnose and hopefully fix the problem...

Known Problems

Below is a list of problems that I know about with Charles that you might be having, and the recommended solution:

NOD32 IMON

If you’re running the NOD32 antivirus package and have its IMON service running, you are likely to encounter crashes in Charles – one moment Charles will be running normally and the next it will have just disappeared, leaving your browser broken as it hasn’t corrected your proxy settings (fortunately restarting Charles will remedy that).

There is no fix from NOD32 at this time, so you need to either disable IMON or exclude Charles from it. The later being the preferred option as you continue to benefit from IMON – although you may also find that it interferes with other applications.

Excluding Charles from IMON
We need to add Charles to the exclusions list in order to exclude Charles. Charles is a Java application, so adding the Charles.exe application to the exclusions won’t help: instead you need to add the Charles.exe inside the launch4j-tmp directory in your JRE directory.

Open the NOD32 Control Centre, click on IMON, click on the Setup button to enter IMON Setup.

Go to the Miscellaneous tab and look for the Exclusion panel. Click the Edit... button in the Exclusion panel. The Exclude applications dialog will appear.

Click the Add... button. Find your Java installation. This is probably in C:Program FilesJavajre* where the * is a version number. If you have multiple JREs installed check which version Charles is using (use About Java in the Help menu). Inside the JRE folder will be a launch4j-tmp folder, in which will be the Charles.exe that you need to exclude.

Reporting A Crash

If your problem isn’t described above then please report it to me. What will be a great starting point is if you can send:

  • Your OS name and version (eg. Windows XP SP2)
  • The version of Java that you’re running Charles in, as reported by the About Java option in the Help Menu
  • Look for any Java crash logs that have been created in the Charles directory (eg. C:\Program Files\Charles), they will be named hs_err_pid###.log. Please copy and paste one of these into the email.

Finally send all of that to me using the Contact page.