You can always find interesting stuff if you poke around in the registry. For example, the Customer Error Report (CER) mechanism logs some basic usage stats into the registry, under the keys like
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Softimage\SOFTIMAGE|SICORE Engine\C:|Program Files|Autodesk|Softimage 2013|Application|bin\ProductInfo
- calUptime is the cumulative amount of time that Softimage has been open. By cumulative, I mean it is the total uptime for all Softimage sessions, ever.
- upTime is the process uptime (not including any idle time). Again, this is a cumulative total.
- crashCount is the number of crashes caught by CER.
- SessionStartCount is the total number of Softimage sessions.
- SessionCleanCloseCount is the total number of clean exits with no crash. You’ll notice in my case that the crashCount + SessionCleanCloseCount doesn’t equal the total number of sessions. That’s because CER doesn’t catch all crashes, and CER doesn’t catch things like the XSI.exe process being ended in the Task Manager.
* I believe that the uptime totals are in 100-nanosecond intervals.
eX-SI 
Now that you don’t work for “them” anymore, could you perhaps shed some light on one of my favorite questions: why isn’t there a way to send CER reports indirectly when dealing with an offline workstation?
CER reports are sent to a service running on a Web server. To send them, you have to run senddmp.exe with a bunch of special command line arguments.
In theory, it might be possible to send them from another, connected machine.
You can collect the CER data yourself to send in an e-mail. QA or support could then look at [some of] the data, but to look at the call stacks would be more of a Dev thing. The thing with the auto submissions is that the Web service automatically extracts the call stack and has access to the debug symbols to make the call stack readable.
I was going to a post about this sometime…
Ah, thanks 😉
So it basically would be gathering the data (which could be done on the offline computer) and use a simple “sendtoAutodesk” app (on the online PC), if you wanted to send it exactly where the CER now is sent?
Yes, something like that. I used Process Monitor to capture the senddmp command line, but I didn’t test calling senddmp manually. The cmd line doesn’t look super simple
“C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2013\Application\bin\senddmp.exe”
/APPXML “” /APPLOCALEID 1033
/DMP “C:\Users\blairs\Autodesk\Softimage_2013\MTL2UA0150CWY4fdae16a6f4c4e93603f470.dmp”
/UPITOKEN “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2013\UPI\upiconfig.xml”
/CADSETTINGSPATH SOFTWARE\Autodesk\Autodesk Softimage 2013\2013\CadManagerControl\CustomerErrorReport
/SERIALNUM 399-99999999
/SAMPLEDESCALTPATH “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2013\Application\bin\CER\exampleDesc.htm ”
/CALUPTIME 151026979918
/COUNT 24
/EXTRA “C:\Users\blairs\Autodesk\Softimage_2013\MTL2UA0150CWY4fdae16a6f4c4e93603f470.ScriptLog.txt”
/ALTRESPATH “(null)”
/ALTTYPGPATH “(null)”