What is fault bucket and should I care?

Question

As part of our regular preventative maintenance, we check the event logs on the workstations in our network for serious issues (e.g. diskperf errors). Some workstations commonly have a critical error where the explanation is "Fault bucket" followed by some number. Can anybody explain what this means? Does it really point to some critical problem that we should care about? Anything we can do about it so that it no longer shows up?

Solution

A fault bucket identification number is a number assigned by the system to identify specific types of errors. This number is used by Microsoft to identify a particular program error when you send an error report.

If you get a "this program has encountered a problem and needs to close" type error, click the 'Send error report' button, and you may get a resolution to the problem.

You could also try Googling the fault bucket number to see if you can identify the source of the errors.