> Running Disk Cleanup in Vista I was surprised when it cleaned a whopping 4gb > of "system queued windows error reporting" last month. But now, a month > later, it's reporting a whopping 7gb of them! I try to keep my C partition > small, so these are a good 10% of the drive! > > I have system dumps turned off - I've done that since Win98 days. I have > "Write an event to the system log" enabled. > > So how can I just turn this off? Or should I? What's the deal with these > things, which presumably will be around in Win7 also?
The settings are in Control Panel->Problem Reports and Solutions. You can delete them individually via "View problem history" or all at once with "Clear solution and problem history". In "View problem history" you can also ask Windows to check for a solution for any of the issues that are listed. The deal with these things is that they can be really useful. When a program crashes, Windows gathers information about the problem and sends it to an MS server (if you click Send, that is). The crashes are logged and compared to a database of known issues. Sometimes an issue has been resolved and the app vendor either has an update or a workaround, and you'll be notified right away. If there's no solution, the event information is shared with the vendor (if they participate in the program) so it can be investigated. The company I work with joined the WER program a year or so ago and immediately started getting reports of bugs we never knew about. Using the information we got from WER, we were able to resolve most of them, so now people who encounter those same bugs are notified of the availability and location of a fix, which they can download immediately. Most of the files you have are probably there, by the way, because you clicked "Don't Send" when Windows notified you of the crash and asked if you wanted to send crash data to MS. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
