Outound connection on program crash???

I was running M$ word and the program crashed on me. No big deal Ive seen this before right?
No, I had recently installed Norton Internet Security. So after the crash the normal M$ screen of 'this program has surrefered an errorr blah blah blah do you wish to send this info to M$" I normally hit 'dont send' since I dont want to have to go through every file being sent out but even before I hit anything NIS popped up and told me an outbound connection is attempting to conatct microsoft.

So what the hell, do we send info to microsoft all the time without knowing it?

You can disable the error reporting service in your service manager.

Since disabling that service, I've never seen it try to connect to m$.

It sounds like what happends to me sometimes... I crash stuff all the time. When that happends on like my XP box it does that... it'll promt me to tell them about the error. Its just M$ looking out for some of their software, attemting to fix future problems, and basicly covering their ass at some user's expense of beating his or her head agianst a table.

Now since you said you just installed a bunch of Norton stuff, does that mean you had outdated or non-existant AV software? I remember some of the blaster worms or whatever used to try and make connections to Microsoft.com for dDoS. Sometimes MSN messenger and things will attempt to make connections. Also it could be just a program looking for updates.

If it promts to connect like every few minutes then you can bet your ass its a worm or something.

Nope I had updated Norton AV I just added Norton Internet Security. And actually Ive had Norton IS Ive just had it disabled because I do so much network coding that its a pain in the ass to have to be prompted to allow the connection each time I compile my programs and run them again.

I crash stuff too all the time but it prompts you if you would like to send or not. This attempted to send on its own. So far it only been MS Word that has done it too. I always say do not send.

Is the error reporting service supposed to contact M$. I thought that just that reported to the event viewer.

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Is the error reporting service supposed to contact M$. I thought that just that reported to the event viewer.

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Yes. It is supposed to contact m$.

The errors for application and system should show up in the event viewer regardless of whether you have the error reporting service enabled or disabled.

Also, if you always tell it not to send.. then you might as well just disable the service.
One less annoyance.

-- Error Svc def--
This is responsible for the box that pops up wanting you to report an application error or system crash to Microsoft.
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so its just supposed to prompt me if I want to connect, its not supposed to make an outbound connection unless I agress to send