I’ve been running Vista on all of my machines now for a while and everything’s been great so far. Except for my primary machine at home. Internet Explorer was crashing frequently, Windows Explorer was also whenever I was browsing a folder with video files in it, etc. I eventually realized I was only having these problems on this one machine so I figured it had to be something I had on this machine only.

Next time it crashed (a COM surrogate crash), I clicked the “Debug” button instead and took a look at the callstack in Visual Studio. Near the top, the only non-core Windows binary there was nevideo.ax. Based on where it was located on the drive (c:\program files\common files\ahead\dsfilter) I figured it was a codec installed by Nero CD/DVD burning software I use. I renamed it, rebooted, and tried to reproduce the crashes. It’s now been a week and I haven’t since seen either of the two crashes I was seeing at least 5-6 times a day. At this point, I ended my debugging (aka “lazy-don’t-want-to-really-debug-anything debugging”) and am much happier now.

I haven’t yet checked out the Nero site to see if they have any updates for Vista or general new versions but will do soon. In the meantime, life is good.

Update (3/11/07): I looked at the Nero site and found an update to the version I had. So I decided to give it a shot. After 4.5 hours of downloading (the patch is almost 200 megs) and maybe 15-20 minutes of installation time I got the update installed. The good news is that it seems to have fixed the crashes I was having before so I no longer have to disable (i.e., hide) the nevideo.ax file. You can get the update here.