>Looks like Mark already gave a good technical suggestion here. But maybe you were asking about the interpersonal aspect of this situation, in other words how do you handle a caller who's defensive and not very knowledgeable?

"Turn on your modem, click on the PCAnywhere icon, and when it asks you for a phone number, enter..."

If they can't be relied on to relay what it says on the screen accurately, or what they did to make the thing break, may as well charge them for support and see for yourself - saves on tranquilizers, and the user is under far less pressure to relay an exact message. If they have decent Internet connectivity, I can connect via the Internet (I have static IP, and am experimenting with Deerfield's new DNS2Go service; an Internet connection saves on long distance charges!) You can track what they do keytroke for keystroke, see the actual error, and if necessary, there are tools like W3Investigator that can be installed to log every user interaction off-line to a file so that you can see exactly hwat happened when with a log that can drive a script to reproduce an error.