Symptom:

When a customer has problems with a Men & Mice service running on Windows 2008 (or Vista SP1), the Men & Mice development team sometimes requests a "dump" file of a process that terminates in an error (aka a program "crash"),

Problem:

Starting with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1, Windows Error Reporting can be configured so that crash dumps are created and collected automatically whenever an application crashes. 

Solution

This feature is not enabled by default. To enable it you need to add the following key to the registry:  

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps

For regular applications the folder keeping the dump files is located by default at:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps

For a service like Men & Mice DNS/DHCP Server Controller or Men & Mice Central it should be at:

System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\CrashDumps

Note that for 32-bit service running on 64-bit system the folder should be found at:  

SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\CrashDumps

You can specify the location adding the string value

(REG_EXPAND_SZ) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\DumpFolder

By default the last 10 crash dump will be stored but that can be configured and also the type of dump created. If you don’t want to create a dump for all applications crashing you can specify per-application setting. For more detailed information see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb787181%28VS.85%29.aspx   

See also:

Dissecting Application Errors in Microsoft Windows