While browsing through your media folders in Vista, you might have experienced the COM Surrogate has stopped working error. The most likely causes of this error are the codecs and COM components that are installed by the various not Vista compatible applications you might have installed. DivX, VLC and Nero to name a few.
There are two solutions for this problem.
- Disable Thumbnails.
- Install ffdshow codec.
Disabling thumbnails is of course not a good solution. So, you must try installing the ffdshow tryouts codec found here (link opens in new window). At the time of writing this post ffdshow tryouts official release is ffdshow tryouts beta2 updated on March 22, 2007. Just download the official beta2 package and install it by running the downloaded package.
This should fix COM Surrogate has stopped working error in Vista. This solution might not work for everyone, but it works for most users.
If the above method did not solve your problem, try upgrading your version of Nero or DivX to the latest release.
