Diagnosing ZC crash bugs - How YOU can help

I probably should have done this a while ago, but hey, I'm not exactly the most reliable person here.

If you run into a ZC or ZQ bug that outright crashes the program (in this case, I mean when it gives you the standard windows error dialog box) and you find it happens randomly or is very difficult to replicate, there is something you can do to give us devs the information needed to diagnose the crash.

Pretty much all of the current crash bugs are still around for one and only one reason: we simply don't know what's causing them and don't have enough information to treat it. Up until a bit ago I wasn't sure what we can do about it, but there is an option that, while it requires some work on our part, has helped me fix at least 2 difficult bugs that I likely would never have found otherwise. So what can you do? Assuming you are on Windows XP (I can't say what you can do on Vista or 7 or another OS)

1) When ZC or ZQ crashes and shows the windows error dialog, close it completely and then IMMEDIATELY:

2) Go to the start menu and click "Run". Type in 'drwtsn32.exe' and press OK

3) In this program you'll see a bunch of options relating to crash dumps and the like. If you want, you can change the crash dump type from to Full if it's currently set on mini, but I don't think that would be important for my purposes. Anyway, one of the fields at the top will have the label "Crash Dump" and will be filled with a filename path. The file SHOULD be called user.dmp. This is the important part.

4) Navigate to the location listed in that field above and then copy/paste user.dmp. Rename it to something descriptive and then upload it somehow. Either post it along with the normal bug report or PM it to me, or someone else if I'm not available.

If the major bugs in ZC are to be addressed, we devs need information and this is one major way of doing so. I can't vouch that I can be successful every time with this method but I think I can at least get an idea of where things go wrong. Crash bugs and quest corruption bugs are of utmost concern right now. If you have any problems with the method above, please post in this topic as I can't guarantee that everything I've said here is completely correct.