I already suggested a couple of workarounds, but they call came with their own quirks or inconveniences. None of them was 100% satisfying.
Which actually was good news to me, as this inspired me to develop a ruthless, but lucrative plot: I would sue the living daylights out of the poor folks in Redmond, based on a charge of malicious removal of vital features from their operating system, win the trial with fanfare, and then retreat to my newly-acquired beach villa on a remote island, my only connection to my former life being the ultra-hyper-gargantomanically-fast direct Internet connection via my own private satellite parked in stationary orbit 36000 km above Brod mansion.
It wasn't meant to be.
The bubble burst after a mouse click at the right time in the wrong place. For all eternity, cursed shall be the day I was taught to use the right mouse button.
Once more, I had run my crashme.exe
test application which causes an
access violation on purpose. I had the Windows Task Manager
running. The WER dialog popped up, but for some reason, instead of using
that dialog, I right-clicked the process entry in the Task Manager window.
And there it was: The "Create Dump File" option, which I had not noticed anytime before.
And indeed, this option does what it promises: It produces a dump file which can be loaded into the debugger to inspect the cause of the crash.
So if an application crashes on Vista, and you want to create crashdump information and send it to the developer of the application right away, here's how:
There's even a Knowledge Base article on this feature.
Sigh. There goes the beach villa.