Preventing video thumbnails
The other day I had a family member was trying to view a video file on his PC. Every time they opened the folder and highlighted the icon for the video, explorer would lock up. When I opened the task manager I could see drwatson.exe startup in the task manager. Doctor Watson, by the way, is a terrible name for that process; unless, of course, you have a distinct hatred for doctors. The drwatson.exe process isn't so much a doctor as a grim reaper. He comes along to collect information on the deceased process. It should probably be called reaper.exe. It does its thing for a minute or so and then a dialog appears. It's almost as if Microsoft's reaction to user's complaints about system crashes was to obscure the crash so that the user wouldn't be sure which program was crashing or even if the program was crashing at all. Rest assured, this program was crashing. I decided to disable the creation of thumbnails for videos with the following command.
regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll
You can also disable the creation of image thumbnails with the following command.
regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll
To reinstall the feature, run the same commands with out the /u switch.