strange crashes give me headaches

I got an email from a user about program crashing. As usual they never include program version, os version, os language version. I do believe there is a crash, but debugging crashes that happens on a user's computer will be hard. It sort of ruined my afternoon, knowing that there are strange problems happens to users.

But all crashes happen with a reason. My steps will be to use logs (Yes, I tried DrWatson but the dmp file is always in use, and if I cancel the submit to Microsoft button, the dmp file will be deleted), and see exactly where the crash happens.

Good thing is users usually will be happy to go through some emails than spending hours fishing or grinding stuff, so I just got lucky.

Anyone else got better ideas as how to debug remote crashes without a debugger? This reminded me of the old serial port debugging days, upload a program, see the output of serial port (or sometimes even LEDs) and figure out problems. Could be fun :-)