I was having a problem when viewing my downloads folder which contained a few AVI files. Vista kept giving me an error message “COM Surrogate has stopped working”. A Google search sent me to this post on howtogeek.com. Well, it appears that Nero is a major culprit but I don’t have Nero installed on this machine. After viewing the DLLs opened by rundll.exe in Process Explorer, I noticed that it was crashing when loading C:\Program Files\Palm\PhotoDesktop\H264DecFilter.ax. Un-registering the codec solved the problem.
regsvr32 -u “C:\Program Files\Palm\PhotoDesktop\H264DecFilter.ax”