If you need to get a crashdump running Windows Vista you’ll look for DRWTSN32.EXE for ever and a day. Unfortunately, it’s in vain, Dr Watson died…

Nevertheless that app has been very important for collateral quality control.

Vista has increased the intricacy of everything a lot. In general Vista is not saving minidumps, but keeps account of every crash or error report. If an app is WER registrated a crashdump is stored as well - if it’s not no crashdump is at dumpfolder. Neither here nor there.

This is how it works on Vista (as fair as I could figure out):

• WER just makes a crashdump for WER signed apps respectively if the WER server requests a report
• To get a minidump the following regesty value has to be set:
  HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\ (DWORD) create a key named “ForceQueue” and set it to 1.
• Dumps are getting stored in user directory C:\Users\TheUserName\AppData\Local\Temp and C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue. File extension is *.mdmp.
• You can have an overview at Control Panel-> maintenance -> Problems & Solutions -> Check Problems

You also can find several instructions on the web howto install Dr Watson on Vista. There also seems to a tool called DrVista that might help you - which I didn’t try…