I really can't over-emphasize how dumb/dangerous the idea of disabling the pop-up on crash is.

Actually, not. It is a common and normal thing to do for applications that are intended for unattended operations.

Disabling the popup simply removes the requirement for operator intervention when such errors occur. It does not however, stop the error being logged to the Application event log.

Which, for the deliberately induced error perl -e"'x' x 1e10", records the following event log message:

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    Application Error
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    1000
Date:        2006-12-06
Time:        17:58:57
User:        N/A
Computer:    XXXXXXXXX
Description:
Faulting application perl.exe, version 5.8.6.811, faulting module perl
+58.dll, version 5.8.6.811, fault address 0x0008775c.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microso
+ft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74   Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c   ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 70 65 72   ure  per
0018: 6c 2e 65 78 65 20 35 2e   l.exe 5.
0020: 38 2e 36 2e 38 31 31 20   8.6.811 
0028: 69 6e 20 70 65 72 6c 35   in perl5
0030: 38 2e 64 6c 6c 20 35 2e   8.dll 5.
0038: 38 2e 36 2e 38 31 31 20   8.6.811 
0040: 61 74 20 6f 66 66 73 65   at offse
0048: 74 20 30 30 30 38 37 37   t 000877
0050: 35 63 0d 0a               5c..
[download]

Further, if you have core dumping enabled, disabling the popup doesn't stop the coredump being created.

It's simply not necessary to use a third party monitoring tool for this.