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!

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This article was originally written on 09/26/06 Tagged with: Customizing: Tips & Tweaks, Windows

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Comments (8)

1. April 8, 2007 2:50 pm
   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. December 1, 2007 1:18 am
   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.

3. May 30, 2008 4:19 pm
   Padilla

   This is one of those “It’s so easy I could have figured out myself… but didn’t”.

   Anyway, thanks for explaining it.

4. September 10, 2008 6:10 pm
   vrattlesnake

   That was good,

5. January 15, 2009 1:54 am
   David

   Very helpful, many thanks

6. February 20, 2009 11:18 pm
   James Shepherd

   I have IE6 on my hp comuter running XP pro when I up date to IE7 I cant get a connection any ideas?

7. March 23, 2009 3:37 am
   rajesh

   After applying software restriction policy, when the user access the particular program an error message shows “Windows cannot open this program because it has been prevented by software restriction policy” . I want to stop showing this error message, because I don’t want the user know that it had been restricted through software restriction policy by the admin

8. May 25, 2009 10:36 am
   whsla45

   I disable the error reporting, but I still get the report to microsoft when I try to download Adobe Reader 9.

   Is someting else I can do?

   whsla45