The Most Annoying Error Ever
For a few months now, my computer had been annoying the hell out of me. Any time I opened a folder with any kind of video files in it, this annoying window would pop up:
I would close COM Surrogate and then two seconds later, it would pop up again. And again. And again. I could still play the video files just fine, but it was incredibly annoying to keep having this dumb error pop up. I researched it online and found out that most people were able to fix it be updating their Divx codec and Ahead Nero files to the latest versions. That didn't work for me, and I was still getting it after I completely removed Nero. I couldn't completely remove Divx, because nearly 95% of my videos use that codec.
Last night I finally solved this! One of the traits of this COM Surrogate BS is that you can't view thumbnails of your videos. But in looking through my folders, I realized that the videos whose thumbnails weren't viewable were all added after February 16, 2009. So I checked my list of installed programs to see what was installed around that time.
And there it was: Pinnacle TVCenter Pro. After a little more digging online I found the testimonial of someone who started getting the error after they installed a Pinnacle Dazzle stick. They solved their problem by renaming one of the shared Pinnacle driver files (H264DecFilter.ax). I found it on my system and renamed it. I went to my test folder (Lost Season 5) and waited. Sure enough, the thumbnails started appearing. No more COM Surrogate error! :-D
It's always satisfying to solve an issue like this... But it baffles me how there are still so many compatibility issues with Vista. I mean, Windows 7 will be released later this year. It blows my mind that these companies still haven't fixed these obvious errors.
I would close COM Surrogate and then two seconds later, it would pop up again. And again. And again. I could still play the video files just fine, but it was incredibly annoying to keep having this dumb error pop up. I researched it online and found out that most people were able to fix it be updating their Divx codec and Ahead Nero files to the latest versions. That didn't work for me, and I was still getting it after I completely removed Nero. I couldn't completely remove Divx, because nearly 95% of my videos use that codec.
Last night I finally solved this! One of the traits of this COM Surrogate BS is that you can't view thumbnails of your videos. But in looking through my folders, I realized that the videos whose thumbnails weren't viewable were all added after February 16, 2009. So I checked my list of installed programs to see what was installed around that time.
And there it was: Pinnacle TVCenter Pro. After a little more digging online I found the testimonial of someone who started getting the error after they installed a Pinnacle Dazzle stick. They solved their problem by renaming one of the shared Pinnacle driver files (H264DecFilter.ax). I found it on my system and renamed it. I went to my test folder (Lost Season 5) and waited. Sure enough, the thumbnails started appearing. No more COM Surrogate error! :-D
It's always satisfying to solve an issue like this... But it baffles me how there are still so many compatibility issues with Vista. I mean, Windows 7 will be released later this year. It blows my mind that these companies still haven't fixed these obvious errors.