What is COM Surrogate and why has it stopped working?

COM SURROGATE HAS STOPPED WORKING windows vista?

• ive been getting the "com surrogate has stopped working" message and it says the problem was caused by XVID. ive tried looking on HOWTOGEEK.COM but nothing worked. ive not got or ever had NERO and i dont have DIVX. has anyone got anymore solutions as its really annoying. also would uninstalling xvid help. i havent tried that yet because i dont actually know what XVID does. PLEASE HELP!!!!

• Answer:

  XviD is a video codec (similar to DivX but open source i believe). It decodes video that has been compressed with that codec and enables you to watch it. Firstly, there may be a version out that fixes this problem. Download and install the one from this link and see if it fixes the problem: http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/ If not, well you could remove it, however it seems something or someone uses it or else it wouldn't be installed, so there is a chance that something that plays video will not work with all files again. It could even be something like your digital camera that records videos in Xvid format to save space (for instance) However i wouldn't be too concerned. I get a similar issue when viewing movie files from a network drive and simply ignore the message. It doesn't seem to cause any system instability. Infact i don't think i've seen one since i upgraded to Vista SP1. So you could try that too! (get it via windows update or http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B0C7136D-5EBB-413B-89C9-CB3D06D12674&displaylang=en )