Disabling Dr. Watson in Windows 7

When an application crashes on Windows 7 where Visual Studio is installed, you're normally prompted to Debug the application (after waiting for it to check for issues :( ). However some applications always get caught by Dr. Watson and never give you a chance to debug. There are a few articles out there on disabling Dr. Watson for XP, but Vista and Windows 7 are different enough that the other techniques often fail to help.

Based on the other articles I was able to find a similar option for Windows 7.

  • Open the Control Panel.
  • Select System and Security | Action Center.
  • Select Change Action Center settings on the left.
     
  • Scroll to the bottom and select Problem reporting settings
  • You'll eventually end up here:

Change the selection to Never check for solutions , hit OK to apply and you're ready to debug.

Shortcut

It turns out the actual change to the registry is a minor one: It adds a Disabled value to the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting key. Cut and paste the following into a file named Disable WER.reg and double click to import it into the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting]
"Disabled"=dword:00000001

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Published : Sep 07, 2009
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