I was thinking about this after reading these great slide decks by Jeff Atwood, which reemphasized to me that SO is not meant to be a forum or support site, and not even for one-off Q&A, but rather something that generates general reusable articles.
I think closing these questions is the clearest path for this site to survive and flourish. The test needs to be not "would I like to help this person?" but rather "is having a page about this question going to be useful in future?"
I think AU needs a strong direction or consensus on this otherwise there may be pushback that it's unhelpful or negative to close a question when the person's clearly having trouble.
Some specific actions when you see such a question:
- comment advising the user to file a bug etc, with a link
- don't downvote, the question is invalid not bad
- flag for moderators or close them
- ideally one of the moderators would add some banner text about not filing bugs here
- flag