Fetching playlists from Windows Media Player throwing non-descriptive exception

Question

I’m building a WPF application that needs to interface with Windows Media Player. Before making a call to get all my local playlists, I initialize the media player like so:

Type mediaPlayerCoreType = Type.GetTypeFromCLSID(new Guid("{6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6}"));
_mediaPlayerCore = System.Activator.CreateInstance(mediaPlayerCoreType) as IWMPPlayer4;

Then I get the playlists like so:

IWMPPlaylistArray playlistArray = _mediaPlayerCore.playlistCollection.getAll();

This had been succeeding for the past few weeks but it suddenly stopped and hasn't worked since. I've added an album here and removed an album there, but nothing out of the ordinary. The exception I get from getAll() is:

Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040EA1  or
Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040EA2

No inner exception. Error code: -2147217759. My web search turned up nothing on 0x80040EA1 and nothing helpful on 0x80040EA2.

Thank you