When a program crashes a dialogue box dutifully pops up where you can send a
report with details of the error to Microsoft. Does clicking on the “Send” button
actually do anything-are there people at MS who look over these things daily and
then suggest/devise fixes for the OS? In my usual cynical manner when it comes
to such things I don’t click on Send, assuming that it would be a waste of effort
and resources, destined for some black hole in the dank recesses of Microsoft’s
website. But what do I know…
The data that gets sent describes in great detail what the program was doing when it crashed. I doubt they have time to look at every single report, but if they see one report becoming very frequent, they’ll probably take a look at it. I use similar data in my work and it’s extremely valuable.
I don’t know if it makes a difference, but you can right click on my computer, go to properties, Advanced Tab, then click on Error Reporting and turn that feature off. I’m guessing it sends them a register/hex dump and maybe a list of things that are running so they can watch for trends, but I doubt they look at each one individually.
Occasionally, especially if it’s a known bug. If the status report thing pops up with a link “more about this error” (or something like that) and you follow it, there will sometimes be a fix for your problem.
If MS gets bombarded with enough errors, they sometimes will put some effort into fixing the problem.
I always send the report, and have been asked to provide more info (sending a full dump, for instance) and have gotten fixes. I don’t know if John Q. Public would get that level of support, but corps do
I happen to work at a large software company headquartered in Redmond Washington.
It’s not that those error reports are treated like a Blue Letter from the Hudsucker Proxy. Its more a statistical tracking tool for the Windows team. If a particular error report type starts going way way up, then that indicates a problem. Or if a patch is released to address a problem, whether error reports about that problem go up or down is important information. And the error reports are used by testers to advocate for bug fixes, they can show management that such and such an issue resulted in 2 million high visibility errors last month, and we need to do something about it.
How would they determine if one report becomes very frequent? Do the reports include some sort of checksum on the error/machine state that they can look at and tally automatically? I shouldn’t think a simple error number would be enough when you’re getting reports from a wide range of machines with different setups. How do they find significant error clusters?
How Windows Error Reporting Works, on the Microsoft site, has some information.
But that’s nothing compared to their upcoming WSYP System. You need to register to watch the video on MS’s site, but YouTube also has it. Hopefully that will encourage y’all to get into the habit of pressing ‘Send’. 
That’s GREAT!
Bob
Ha! That is funny! 
In another life doing tech support for WinXP, our trainer mentioned that he’d been to MS HQ, and actually met the guy in charge of whichever department collects those reports. Our trainer mentioned that he usually clicks ‘Don’t Send’, and apparently the manager seemed surprised and was quite insistent that he send them in, as they are actually looked at. (In aggregate I imagine, but still).
Basically what Lemur866 said. If our software company were much (much) larger, we could benefit from similar data ourselves. Few organizations can organize a reporting tool that can record useful data, along with the manpower to store and organize it. Mozilla is the only other app I can think of off the top of my head that has a similar tool. Oh yeah, SharpDevelop will display a stack-trace, and open your browser to their bug reporting forums for you to paste it in there.
I very rarely click “Send”, chiefly because the sort of sites that normally cause my browser to crash are not the sort of sites that I want to tell ol’ Bill I’ve been browsing. 
YMMV of course…
Then you might care to report that your latest WGA patch seems to cause my PC to blue screen with a STOP 0xA. And yes, I’ve submitted problem reports. And when I do a rollback to a working config and tell Update to not apply the patch, it gets applied anyway. This is not the place to go into further detail.
Sorry, I should’ve said report type (which is just a stack trace).
I also work with the same kind of data, although in my case it’s data that is sent automatically when some kind of traumatic software event occurs. In the case of the data I work with, we get about 80 to 100 million records a day (and that’s with some record sampling turned on). I know that our analysts do a lot of problem tracking through these reports at the aggregate level.
Susan