Never re-initialize the camera in-process on Windows

Tearing down and re-creating a MediaCapture inside a running process can wedge the Windows Camera Frame Server for the whole machine, with a persistent E_HANDLE until the service is restarted. The only reliable recovery is a fresh process, and the fix that stuck was deleting the code that could do otherwise.

August 7, 2026 · 6 min · Corey Leavitt