One specific cause of ehExtHost crashes that can occur when launching Media Center

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A while back, I wrote a blog post describing a scenario where launching Windows Media Center causes a crash dialog to appear with the title ehExtHost.  At the time I wrote that post, I had not found any specific add-ins that consistently caused problems.  However, since then, I have heard from many customers seeing this type of crash, and all of the crashes so far have been caused by a specific add-in.

In the scenarios I have seen, the customers had computers that came pre-installed with a Symantec Norton anti-virus software package.  They had uninstalled this software package, and the crashes started happening afterwards.  This anti-virus software includes a Media Center add-in so you can access the settings from within Media Center, and the uninstall process appears to remove the files but leave behind the Media Center add-in registration information in the registry.  Because the registration is still on the system, Media Center will attempt to launch this Symantec add-in each time it is opened, but since the files have been removed, the add-in will crash.

If you have a Media Center system, and are seeing ehExtHost crashes when you open Media Center, and if you have previously uninstalled a Norton anti-virus package that came pre-installed on your system, you can use steps like the following to resolve this crash:

  1. Click on the Start menu, choose Run, type cmd and click OK
  2. Run this command:  reg delete "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility\Applications\{4874559d-e801-4f21-a580-6f5f0b87017c}" /f
  3. Run this command:  reg delete "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility\Categories\Background\{51537886-fe58-4b67-9fbc-567013c765f6}" /f
  4. Run this command:  reg delete "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility\Entry Points\{51537886-fe58-4b67-9fbc-567013c765f6}" /f

The above steps remove the registration information for this particular add-in from the 3 locations that it has appeared in the registry on all of the systems that were encoutering ehExtHost crashes that I have diagnosed so far.

If these steps do not help on your system, please refer to my previous blog post for a list of steps you can use to gather additional information that can be used to narrow down the root cause of this type of crash.