well, to find a "natural way" to distribute the coefficients $b,c$ in the plane, you could treat this problem as the special case $n=2$ of a classic problem in random-matrix theory: take an $n\times n$ real matrix $M$ with independent identical normal distributions of the matrix elements $M_{nm}$; what is the probability that all $n$ eigenvalues are real? for $n=2$ we would then identify ${\rm tr}\,M=2b$ and ${\rm det}\,M=c$. this probability is known exactly [1] for any $n$, it equals $2^{-n(n-1)/4}$; so for $n=2$ the probability of real roots is $1/\sqrt{2}$. [1] <A HREF="http://math.mit.edu/~edelman/homepage/papers/circular.pdf">The circular law and the probability that a random matrix has k real eigenvalues</A>, A. Edelman (1993). (Published in Journal of Multivariate Analysis 60 (1997) 203-232.)