Keep getting an error message even with Error Reporting disabled

Would anyone have any idea why I keep getting an error message even though Windows Error Reporting is disabled? When I close Firefox I get a message that says "Firefox has stopped working" and offers a link that says "Close the program."

In this post I'm not concerned with Firefox. It may or may not have a problem but I'll leave that for another time.

What I'm wondering here is why Windows (Vista) still gives me this message even with Error Reporting for all users disabled from the Control Panel and the Error Reporting Service is also disabled. Thanks.

 

From a software design POV it would makes sense to separate "display an error message to the user" from "send error reports to Microsoft and those software developers Microsoft shares the information with". A search turned up this page about Windows Server 2008:

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/disable-program-has-stopped-working-error-dialog-in-windows-server-2008/

where you can see the "has crashed" dialog that will be shown when Windows Error Reporting is enabled, and the dialog that will be shown when Windows Error Reporting is disabled.

Perhaps Vista is the same and you are seeing the type of dialog that is normal when Windows Error Reporting is disabled?

 

Wind, that's some excellent detective work, much appreciated. I'd also read on another forum where someone else was having the same situation, they disabled WER but still got a message, it just looked different. I'm sure now that's what's happening to me. I did notice when I disabled WER, the message looked different.

I found the registry keys that were given in the article in your link and set them as suggested. I only get the error under certain circumstances, so I'll give it some time and see what happens. I'm pretty confident that that should be the end of it though.

 

FWIW, that link was just to show the two different dialogs. If I knew you would be interested in registry settings I would have included two other links I'm aware of:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/124873
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb513638(v=vs.85).aspx

We wouldn't want to hide important error information from ourselves. Especially if it is merely slightly annoying, if the suppression settings are coarse grained and would affect other software than that which we want to target, etc

 

Thanks for that additional info Wind, a lot of useful stuff there.

I agree with you in principle, but in the 18 years I've been using Windows, I've yet to have a single Windows error message that proved useful. The information they provide is sparse, and unintelligible to the average user. It seems to me it's mainly for Microsoft's benefit as a way to get information about errors for their own use. It would be wonderful if they'd develop something that's actually useful for end users. They may have in 7 or 8, I don't know about those OSs.

 

It happened.

 

the error reporting and even BSOD are much more pleasant in Windows 8.

but those are not 'features' that i want to 'enjoy' too often.

 

I don't know how WER and related mechanisms work under the hood, but there appears to be code which catches errors that programs either don't catch or just don't handle well. Two problem scenarios would be 1) a program that doesn't have a UI silently crashing and the crash going unnoticed, 2) a program with a UI silently crashing during shutdown, either after the UI is brought down or about the time the user expects it to be brought down. Even a vanilla "XYZ has stopped working" error message would be better than nothing in those cases, because it overtly informs the user that an error occurred. IOW, I think it would be unwise to suppress such messages for all programs.

Somewhere I saw signs of a mechanism to exclude programs from Windows Error Reporting. I didn't study it, but my initial suspicion was that said exclusion would only apply to the phone home side of things. That it wouldn't also suppress the vanilla error message you get when WER is disabled. Interested parties might want to read up on that and experiment with it.