Windows Vista Error Reporting

I had enough!!!

I knew something is wrong with Vista since I began working with background threads in my ASP.NET web applications. The thing I was working on was a Web Service that was executing some work in a background using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem and returning immediately. All was working fine as long as the executed background method was working correctly. Sometimes though it was throwing exceptions.

In such cases, when an exception was thrown not on a main thread of a web application, Windows Vista was happy to assist me (behind the scenes), by writing a special report file so I could send a report to Microsoft. Fine? NO!!!

I have nothing against sending error reports to Microsoft. No. That is not the problem. The problem is, that before I even realized, my system has run out of disk space! Every exception that was thrown in my application, caused Windows Error Reporting to write some files for a total of few hundreds MB (yes mega bytes). But that's not all. To write this report file a special process DW20.exe was started. It ususally takes 50% of my CPU (since I'm running dual core).

As it is common for Microsoft's ideas, they wanted something good and useful, but it came out as usual: a thing that you just can live with (same holds true for Vista's UAP and Internet Explorer's Internet Explorer Enhanced Security). So I've searched google, for a solution to my problems and found this article that describes how to change Windows Error Reporting Options. (in XP this option was somewhere else, now it is hidden a bit better).

To check if you suffer from the same problem I did, check your "c:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Windows\WER" directory. Just don't be surprised.

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