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Disable those annoying "X Application has Encountered a Problem and Must be Shut Down" messages in Windows XP

It's frustrating enough when your application crashes. Then the annoying dialog expects you to "Send an Error Report to Microsoft". As if I want Microsoft to know exactly which programs I'm running on my computer.

Here's two ways to turn off that error reporting. First, you can Right-Click on My Computer, go to the Advanced Tab, and choose the "Disable error reporting" option.  

Alternatively, you can navigate to the services console in Administrative tools, find the Error Reporting Service, go into properties and disable it. Either way, those annoying dialogs are gone!

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. When he's not coming up with great how-to articles, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 09/26/06 and tagged with: Windows, Customizing: Tips & Tweaks

Comments (2)

  1. Ron

    I am running XP Pro SP2 on a PC with SATA interface. I just installed MS Office 2007 Pro and started getting the COM Surrogate error message. I can boot with a different drive with Office 2000 Premium on it and I don't get the error. Both drives have WMP v11. Booting to the drive w/2007, I disabled error reporting and the problem seems to have gone away.

    Thanks for the tip.

  2. Boodiman

    Disable those annoying "X Application has Encountered a Problem and Must be Shut Down" messages in Windows XP. Try to find as shown on your diagram but on SP2 seem not to be able that particular facility.


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