Sometimes, when browsing media files within a folder, windows will pop up the “COM Surrogate has stopped working” error–I recently was seeing this on a new laptop running win7 64 bit when browsing pictures in a folder using the default windows picture viewer. Here is the error:

I found a neat little program to replace the windows picture viewer; best of all it is free and dims everything in the background. The program is Nexus Image. All you need to do is right click on a picture in a folder, choose “open with” then “choose default program”. Search the location for where you extracted the program “NexusImage.exe” and then make sure you have “always use the selected program to open this type of file” checked.