This White Paper, which provides ISVs with information on handling software crashes in the field, comes in two parts.

In Part I, we visit "Dr Watson" (drwin32), a technique for recovering crash information from any windows platform. Setting up watson to capture crash dumps tends to be harder than it should be, and this paper covers situations such as multi-user or service crashes involving Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services.

In Part II, we visit the Microsoft Windows Error Reporting Service (WER) and the WinQual program. WER (aka dwwin) is a better way to obtain crash information from end-users than Watson. Available for helping with crashes on Windows XP, 2003, and subsequent operating systems, WER does not work on Windows 2000