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Svish
Asked: 2009-06-09 01:08:39 +0800 CST

Archived and queued Windows Error Reporting

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Just ran Disk Cleanup on a computer here (Windows Vista), and saw 3 items in the list I haven't seen before:

  • Per user archived Windows Error Repo... | 402 MB
  • System archived WIndows Error Repor... | 18,0 KB
  • System queued Windows Error Reporti... | 533 MB

What are those? I assume it is safe to delete, but should I do something with it first? Should I for example be kind to Mircosoft and send all that queued stuff? How would I do that?

Note: Wish I knew what was after those dots. Assume it is "Reporting", but no idea if there is more after it. Hate dialogs that can not be resized... (or at least lets me know what is behind truncated text in a tooltip)

windows windows-vista windows-7 cleanup

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Yes it is safe to delete these files, they are files generated by Windows Error Reporting when an application error occurs. The per-user data is saved to:

    %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\wer

    the system data is saved to:

    %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\WER\

    THose two folders are split into ReportArchive which is historical reports, and ReportQueue which are reports that have not been sent yet.

    This applies to both Windows Vista and Windows 7.

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  2. These files contain debug information which Windows gathers and saves when there are problems with the system or with programs. They are part of the "Windows Error Reporting (WER) and Crash Data" which was introduced with Windows XP and captures product crash data. This way it's possible for end-users to report the information to Microsoft or the manufacturer of the program/driver etc.

    If you run out of space on your system disk, you can delete the files using the Disk Cleanup tool.

    The full lines are

    • Per user archived Windows Error Reports
    • Per user queued Windows Error Reports
    • System archived Windows Error Reports
    • System queued Windows Error Reports

    The directories are

    • %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive
    • %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue
    • %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive
    • %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue

    Here is a link to Microsoft's Windows Quality Online Services (Winqual) site.

    P.S.: There are some known issues which can lead to very large files (several GBs). Read this blog post if you experience the same problem.

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