Some of our Windows XP Developer machines die (black screen - no ping) when starting up Tomcat from a console. This only happens if the Tomcat debug console window is displayed (not minimised). When minimised, the startup / run is successful.

I've checked for Tomcat logs and the crash sessions produce empty (zero bytes) tomcat log files. No system logs exist and no crash dump is created even though this is enabled in the Windows settings.

The machine is dual screen and another machine with the same image has the same issue. The only clue is just before the crash, one of the monitors the system reports "Cannot display video mode 1280x1024" (approximate error, didn't write it down).

Is there a way I can get Windows to produce log files of this crash session?

Beyond running Tomcat as a service / minimised window, how can I fix (or even investigate)?