How to disable error reporting by the Application Error Reporting tool in Office XP

Microsoft Office XP offers a new, easy-to-use, crash-reporting tool named Application Error Reporting. If an Office program crashes, the Application Error Reporting dialog box appears and requests your permission to send a detailed report of the problem over the Internet to Microsoft. If a known problem occurs, the tool provides a link from the error report to a service pack, hotfix, or Microsoft Knowledge Base article. If Microsoft has not previously found or addressed the problem, the information can be transmitted to a Microsoft problem database for investigation.

This article explains how you can disable the Application Error Reporting tool if you do not have Internet access or do not want to use this feature. If you disable the tool, you receive the following error message instead when your program crashes: The only button that you can click is Close, which restarts the program if the check box to do so is selected.

Instead of disabling error reporting, you can redirect the error reports to a local server on your network. See the references section of this article for more details.

Disable Error Reporting by Changing a Registry Entry

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
To change the Application Error Reporting tool so that it does not report errors, follow these steps:

1. Start Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
2. Locate and then click the following key in the registry:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type DWNeverUpload.
5. Double-click the new value, type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.
6. Quit Registry Editor.

Disable Error Reporting by Using a System Policy

The System Policy Editor, which is included in the Microsoft Office XP Resource Kit, can apply the registry entry from the previous method to all your desktops. To learn more about the Office XP Resource Kit, visit the following Microsoft Web site: To change the Application Error Reporting tool to not report errors by using a system policy, follow these steps:

1. Start the System Policy Editor, and then make sure that the Office10.adm template is loaded.
2. Double-click Default User profile.
3. Expand Microsoft Office XP.
4. Expand Corporate Error Reporting.
5. Click to select the Disable application error reporting check box.
6. Click to select the Check to enforce setting on; uncheck to enforce setting off check box.
7. Click OK.

Test Changes in Error Reporting Configuration

To test the configuration of your Error Reporting Server, you can use the Office XP Application Recovery tool that is installed with Office XP. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Star a Microsoft Office program.
2. One the Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Office Tools, and then click Microsoft Office Application Recovery.
3. In the Microsoft Office Application Recovery box, select the program that you started in step 1, and then click Recover Application.

These steps will generate an application error. Additionally, you may be prompted to send an error report.

For more information about error reporting, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: