In our situation we’re running boring old business software that doesn’t need high-end graphics drivers, and it’s huge enough program that we probably benefit unusually much from tools that help you track down unexpected side effects from distant unrelated chunks of code.

But like Chris said, “It can be the difference between 10 minutes to fix and 10 days to fix”, and for some problems I’ve gone chasing after it’s been hugely useful once you pay the setup hassle costs.

I’m a Software Engineer on a large commercial C++ program, and we also struggle with how to deal with crash reports and bug submissions that are difficult to reproduce.

I’ve been driving a project to have internal clients use our product on a virtual machine running under VMWare Workstation to record the screen and internal state of the program. VMWare provides a Visual Studio plugin that lets you hook into the recording as though it were a live process and do (most) of the debugging you could normally do, like step through execution and examine memory locations. You can also do some exotic things under the replay that you can’t do in a live process, like notice a bad value in a particular location and play the recording backwards to discover who wrote it there.

The visual studio plugin is kinda buggy, and VMWare actually cut the feature from their latest release of Workstation, but it’s been golden for us because it means that any time someone submits us a bug report with a replay attached we’re 100% able to reproduce it and have full debugger level detail into exactly what was going on at any time during the recording. Depending on how much time you spend chasing bugs that you can’t reproduce it could be worth all the extra hassle of dealing with the recording and replay environments.

I’d be happy to talk to you about it in more detail if you’re interested.

I agree with quirk. When TeamSpeak 3 finally went into open beta their bug report forum exploded with bugs. Most of the reports were users lack of knowledge with the program and or their system. Which I think is unfair to blame the user for not being tech savvy. Not to mention all the duplicate posts.

You mentioned about crowd sourcing to a db and I think that’s a good choice. Let a few users sift through all the reports and convert them to the db for you. Maybe try and get a better How To and such. It seemed to do a good job for them.

Keep up the good work!

Was there something in particular you were thinking about? They’re verbose, but mostly about game state. No passwords or anything like that, but there are IP addresses in them.