New in ArcGIS 9.3: you can send error reports to ESRI any time ArcGIS crashes. Software crashes are a serious software quality issue. Our goal is to eliminate them. The folks on our development teams wanted to explain why crash reporting was added and why it can help build better software for you:

We know crashes are frustrating to you and when they occur in stressful situations doesn't help. For example, after you've worked several hours, a memory leak consumes your system's resources, or a hardware limit is reached when ArcGIS is used with a third party extension that may not be fully compatible with your version of ArcGIS.

Crashes are frustrating for us too. Too often they cannot be easily reproduced when you report them;  or discovered through standard testing methods and eliminated before we release each new version of ArcGIS .

Error reporting is a way for us to improve our support to you. To help us with this effort, at 9.3 all the ArcGIS Desktop applications as well as ArcGIS Explorer have an error reporting mechanism that automatically captures information any time you experience a software crash. By sending these error reports you enable us to investigate and very possibly fix the issues.

This short video provides an overview on how we investigate and act on all crash reports. It was shown at this year’s User Conference in San Diego. This provides a “peek” into what we do to review, evaluate, and act on the error reports that you send to us. If you don't have the time, here's the short form:

 

 

Immediately above is an example from a panel from our internal Crash Report website showing a report of the top 5 issues that were reported most frequently by users over a given time frame (e.g., within the past week or month). These statistics help us to understand frequency of occurrence for all issues and help us to understand and prioritize our responses.

Last, a help topic on error reporting is available for ArcGIS Desktop that provides more details about submitting your error reports to us.