This isn't obvious to me from the FAQ, so I'd like to know if SF is a good place to ask these kinds of questions:

  * Why does KB-xyzzy not install on our mail server? Here are the error codes I get... (MS support instead?)
  * I am getting the following blue-screen crash on one of our Vista workstations, can you help me diagnose the cause? (Google for error code?)
  * On login one of my users is getting a crash from MS service foobar.exe, how can I fix? (MS support again?)

I have a pile of things in the event logs for our servers that I want to either understand or resolve, and I'm afraid that if I post questions about each here I'll get smacked down with a "this is why you should call tech support". I've had terrible luck with tech support on some of our vendors (though some are stellar, and I always go to them first).

And of course I've found that if I search the web for a DLL or driver filename involved in a bluescreen crash, or an error code, I end up with thousands of pages of fools shooting HijackThis logs at each other. Or "dllandexeinfo.com" hits that are trying to sell virus software.

Is SF the right place to ask questions about diagnosing problems like the above examples?

My instinct says "it depends". Some questions are just too specific to a particular setup to be useful to anyone except the person asking (voiding the point of asking on a public forum). But others, such as a driver crash, could be very broad in usefulness.

What do you think?