&gt; IMO, a workable happy medium is the giving the ability to expand the error message to get the dirty operational details, an error code, or similar. That way, the support tech, power user, engineer, etc, dealing with &quot;Why is the Internet broken?&quot;, can have some data to help him figure out how to unbreak the Internet today.<p>Or write it to a user-accessible log file.<p>Opaque error messages that fail to accurately describe the problem out of a misguided desire to coddle users drive me bonkers.