e-mailing Microsoft, with attachment

[bruto]

How would they even acknowledge you? The error reporting doesn't contain any contact detail (at least not on my system).

Windows VISTA sorta has an improved system where it would identify the crash and contact microsoft servers to check for possible updates that may fix it, although I have yet to see any fix for various crashes I had (even vista crashes in microsoft components).

As for anti-virus. Anti-Virus software is getting worse and worse, I don't even use one anymore. You may think it's silly, but for 99.9% of Virii/Trojan, you must take active action in order to activate the virus/trojan on your computer, so if you're calculated and careful, your computer wont get infected (and having a decent firewall installed guards you from about 0.05 of the remaining security risks).

If you insist on running anti-virus software, I would ditch norton and switch to NOD32, norton is bloated and might degrade your PC experience. NOD32 is not nearly as bloated.

The sad thing is that after installing norton, it can be quite difficult to uninstall, even if you use their uninstaller, it may leave remnants on your computer which can cause weird issues.

If they ever did respond, it would be something to worry about!

Don't remind me about Norton! I had Norton AV and firewall on my laptop, and something got corrupted. If I tried to uninstall it said it wasn't there to uninstall, and if I tried to reinstall to repair it, it said it was already there and refused to reinstall. Not only was it virtually impossible to uninstall, but it put up a warning notice literally every 10 seconds, either that it was out of date or that it was turned off. I had to shove the little window down to the edge of the screen to use the computer at all. I finally got most of it uninstalled, but there are still great bloody chunks of norton junk floating around, which I haven't taken the time to clean out. Even after it stopped interfering, it took another little while to find all the little bits that were trying and failing to load when I booted it up.

My new desktop computer came with Norton on it too, and I must confess that as long as it's free and doesn't crash, I'll keep it going, but this time I'll be sure to uninstall it before it expires, and switch back to the freeware stuff that works well enough for me.