com surrogate stopped working

[Generosity]

I upgraded one of my desktop to Windows Vista recently. Installation went fine without any problem and it worked great for couple of days but later started giving problems. First of all my Windows Media Player freezes every time whenever I try to play any audio or video. I always need to kill it from task manager. Secondly whenever I try opening any folder containing video files, I get the following error message:

"com surrogate has stopped working".

Any idea what is it about and how can fix this error as well as WMP issues? Thanks for the helps.

[Domi.nick]

Well even i use to receive this problem when i was using Vista 32bit RC1. In my case i was suspecting the video authoring app which was installed on my PC. After trying so many unsuccessful solutions finally i uninstalled 32bit Vista and installed a fresh copy of 64bit. I dont know whether it will work for you or not but since then i haven't got that Com Surrogate error on my PC. May it got fixed due to 64bit windows or may be because i dint installed that Video Authoring app. You can give a try.

[KOVID]

Thanks for the input Domi.nick. May be or may be not your suggestion can work. Let me tell you that even i had this problem few times last week and in my case i did something else instead of re-installing vista. What i did was i installed Live One Care security suite on my PC along with Two codec packs, that are DivX and XviD. Now when i opened my Video folders, I just gave windows enough time to build thumbnails. And since then i dint faced a single "Com Surrogate" issue so far.

[Generosity]

I appreciate your help Kovid. Thank you very much for the info. By following your Thumbs related solution, seems like i fixed the problem. I opend opened my Video folder, went to folder options and check marked the box in view options always show icons never thumbnails and opening up folders in new window. Now no more com surrogate errors. i applied this to all folders. Thank you.

[supremer]

Well let me tell you guys that the com surrogate error occurs because of incompatible or missing codecs on your system. I had this problem on my Vista when i installed it couple of months ago. While troubleshooting i installed K-LITE codec pack which simply fixed the problems. I can now also play AVI files in my Windows Media Player without any problems.

[Theodore Long]

I found that the COM Surrogate Error would occur when Nero 6.6 or 7 was installed.