Windows Error Reporting

Not to be confused with the Dr. Watson debugging tool which left the memory dump on the user's local machine, Windows Error Reporting collects and offers to send post-error debug information (a memory dump) using the Internet to Microsoft when an application crashes or stops responding on a user's desktop.

The Problem Reports and Solutions Control Panel applet was replaced by the Maintenance section of the Action Center on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.

A new app, Problem Steps Recorder (PSR.exe), is available on all builds of Windows 7 and enables the collection of the actions performed by a user while encountering a crash so that testers and developers can reproduce the situation for analysis and debugging.

The service is provisioned to receive and process well over 100 million error reports per day, which is sufficient to survive correlated global events such as Internet worms.

[15] In order to ensure that error reporting data only goes to the engineers responsible for the product, Microsoft requires that interested vendors obtain a VeriSign Class 3 Digital ID or DigiCert certificate.

This allows distributing solutions as well as collecting extra information from customers (such as reproducing the steps they took before the crash) and providing them with support links.

Error reporting data reveals that there is a small set of bugs that is responsible for the vast majority of the problems users see.

An article in the New York Times confirmed that error reporting data had been instrumental in fixing problems seen in the beta releases of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.

[28] In December 2013, an independent lab found that WER automatically sends information to Microsoft when a new USB device is plugged to the PC.

[27] According to Der Spiegel, the Microsoft crash reporter has been exploited by NSA's TAO unit to hack into the computers of Mexico's Secretariat of Public Security.

According to the same source, Microsoft crash reports are automatically harvested in NSA's XKeyscore database, in order to facilitate such operations.