Windows Error Reporting and Update Cycle

The Windows Error Reporting (WER) system, which captures errors so that a fix can be created and distributed, has two basic phases: capturing and reporting errors, and analyzing and fixing errors.

Capturing and reporting errors. The user starts the application. When a Windows component, device driver, or application fails or stops responding to user input (hangs), a Windows service named DWWIN.EXE intercepts the failure and captures information about both the state of the software and the overall state of the PC. Once the information is collected as a dump or minidump file, the user is presented with the option to look at the information collected, and can then choose to upload the information to Microsoft. (If he chooses not to upload the information, some of the collected data may be kept on the user’s computer.) If the user decides to upload the collected information to Microsoft, then WER makes a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to a Microsoft server that accepts the data. As the file is being uploaded, a real-time analysis is run to see if the failure is one for which there is already a known fix or workaround. In those cases, a response will be generated that points the user to a Web site with the appropriate information.