COM Surrogate has stopped working

Question

Anyone else getting this message at bootup? I used to get it every other day at bootup from cold start. Since I installed the flash drive, I get this messgae once/week. I have a Dell Dimension E520 with 2gb of memory and a flash drive with 4gb of memory. I have talked several times to both India support and elevated it to US OK support and they have no solution. Only idea they have on cause is it may be similar to insufficient memory message I used to occasionally get with XP Pro when I had many programs running at the same time. This occurs at bootup when only start up stuff is loaded. I have cleaned up start up to only essential items. You would think 2gb and additional 4gb of temporary cache is sufficient for Vista. Does not seem to affect any functioning so it is mostly an annoying message. Any ideas?

Jarod99 · Answer

Got the same problem. As I remember reading somewhere.... It is because of some software with  the code that is not compatible or something like that...It keeps popping up whenever I plug in my external driver that has video files on it. It is not really a problems..but an annoying one. hope someone will have the answer to it soon! thnx all!

penguinspenguin · Answer

Yup, 3rd party software installed is causing this. You can verify by doing a clean boot in MSConfig. I've seen it caused by Divx 6.4, Nero 7, and even picaview.   Either leave the programs disabled or upgrade to the latest version.

penguinspenguin · Answer

What about Divx or Nero?   Does it go away if you do a clean boot?

Geo B · Answer

Dell support and I did a Google search and it indicated it was a possible Roxio problem and suggested to install latest version of DIVX player. I did and message still appears periodically.

Geo B · Answer

I can do a restart right after I get the message and message does not re-appear. I can do re-boots for almost a week and no message and then I will get it. Not sure what clean reboot will do since likely will not get the message since I only get it once/week.

penguinspenguin · Answer

If you only get it once a week, it'll just be that much harder to troubleshoot. It's up to you whether you want to hunt it down in MSConfig, waiting a week between each iteration :)

victor.sables · Answer

i am not sure if anyone actually has a solution to the problem. i am very annoyed at the pop-up. COM surrogate has stopped working. it seems to appear with any video items. if any solutions are out there ............please forward them.

Geo B · Answer

Solved this problem by uninstalling Urge software (think it's something to do with MTV) that I had downloaded as an extra in Windows Media Player. Since uninstall, I have never gotten the COM Surrogate message again on my Vista Home Premium E520 Dimension PC. Hope this helps! George

victor.sables · Answer

thanks for the prompt response, but how do i unistall the MTVN feature without unistalling the WMPlayer? this may sound silly, but i am not a software fundi. i have a XPS M1210 with windows vista business.......please help. i need a 'noddy guide'

Geo B · Answer

I was able to go to control panel and uninstall programs and just uninstall the Urge software w/o needing to uninstall Media Player.

dabjarnson · Answer

I also found that uninstalling URGE solved the problem. One might also consider running Regedit and eliminating all references to 'URGE'....just to keep things tidy.

Windows General

COM Surrogate has stopped working

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