How do I disable the 'Debug / Close Application' dialog on Windows Vista?

Solution 1:

To force Windows Error Reporting (WER) to take a crash dump and close the app, instead of prompting you to debug the program, you can set these registry entries:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting]
"ForceQueue"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\Consent]
"DefaultConsent"=dword:00000001

After this is set, when your apps crash, you should see *.hdmp and *.mdmp files in:

%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\WER\

Solution 2:

See here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb513638.aspx

regedit

DWORD HKLM or HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\DontShowUI = "1"

will make WER silently report. Then you can set

DWORD HKLM or HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\Disabled = "1"

to stop it from talking to MS.