Using Visual Studio 2008 I first encountered this when trying to open a standard save file dialog box in visual basic. So far I've worked around it after fruitless searching. Now I find that any action which would cause a save/open dialog (eg. ctrl-O) also fails. I've searched more and still don't know how to fix it.
Stuff I do know: It's not a Visual Studio error, it apparently can occur in any number of other applications (which is why searching for it is annoying)
It's either .NET or COM related, I tried reinstalling all of .NET with no luck, and I've never mucked around with COM ever, I don't really even know what it is.
Something is missing, misplaced, or it could be DLL version issues.
I really don't want to deal with uninstalling VS2008, or MS Office (as one result I found suggested) or any other big application.