Com Surrogate has stopped working - Vista DreamScene

[steve02a]

I have Vista Ultimate on my laptop. I do have Divx installed as a codec too.
My dream scene has stopped working resulting in an error box saying "Com
Surrogate has stopped working."

While I have found some solutions online like uninstall Divx, uninstall any
Nero products, altered my data execution protection (DEP) - and have done all
that, but with no success, I'm wondering if anyone else has any solutions.

Thanks.

 

[zachd [MSFT]]

What's the fault bucket data for that crash according to the Problem Reports
and Solutions Center control panel:
http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html#bucket
?

 

[Shine]

I have Vista Ultimate on my laptop. I do have Divx installed as a codec too.
My dream scene has stopped working resulting in an error box saying "Com
Surrogate has stopped working."

While I have found some solutions online like uninstall Divx, uninstall any
Nero products, altered my data execution protection (DEP) - and have done all
that, but with no success, I'm wondering if anyone else has any solutions.

Thanks.

 

[Ringmaster]

You got to remember Vista was written by Microsoft. Therefore right
out of the gate it is prone to do all kinds of weird and stupid
things. The moronic Com Surrogate error is one such annoyance. I see
it too, but didn't until AFTER I installed Service Pack 1. There
really is no fix, other than to stop using the brain dead Media
Player.

For playing all kinds of videos all of the following are way better,
free and work fine with Vista:

1. GOM Player
2. XnView
3. VLC Media Player

Since none of the above EVER generate some stupid Com Surrogate error
the obvious flaw lies internally within Vista. Gosh damn, what a
shock, Vista is riddled with bugs, who would have thought it.

<snicker>

 

[zachd [MSFT]]

This had me laugh out loud, since COM Surrogate exists to run third party
codecs in their own memory space precisely because they're so unstable.
It's just a DLL host hosting codecs. If it's crashing, you've got a bogus
codec on your system.

GOM/Xn/VLC/MPC/WMP don't use COM Surrogate so wouldn't crash there. It's a
shell tool protecting the shell from bogus codecs that you install.

You can typically directly identify the crashing codec via the crash bucket
data:
http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html#bucket
if you actually want to deal with it. If you can't, I probably can if you
post up your crash info and/or crash bucket number.

~Most~ of the unstable codecs are known at this point, so a COM Surrogate
crash may directly lead to a solution via Check for Solutions. If not, post
up the crash data and I'll see if it's something new/unknown. There are a
couple sad codecs that randomize memory and thus there can't be any direct
solution for those, but the crash data for those should likely lead to
identifying the culprit. =)

This previous post wins for most amusing post of the day. =)

-Zach