Like OP mentioned, all that boils down to the spec. It's easy to imagine that Word will have the crash handling behavior specced (and it does - someone in the t

Like OP mentioned, all that boils down to the spec. It's easy to imagine that Word will have the crash handling behavior specced (and it does - someone in the thread linked to the KB article about that) and it will be different from some other application. In case of web applications, for example, there could be a global customizable generic exception handler that will provide some user friendly message, while collecting loads of data that will help devs to diagnose the problem.