If you cannot measure a 'crash rate' you're doing something wrong. Because if nothing else, there is a low but present base rate of crashes caused by overclocked CPUs, bad memory, and flaky motherboards.
I worked on software for a hardware system sold by my company. We were able to detect when a supplier changed memory suppliers because of the increased number of 'impossible' crashes.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/04/12/40756...
I worked on software for a hardware system sold by my company. We were able to detect when a supplier changed memory suppliers because of the increased number of 'impossible' crashes.