Canon PowerShot videos crashing everything

Some AVI videos were crashing everything on my Mac that tried to view them (Quicktime, Adobe Bridge, to name two). The videos came from my Canon PowerShot camera; model A610 to be exact. [Side note: I love my camera. Thank you Canon for making such an awesome machine!]

After some investigation it turned out to be a codec installed in the /Library/QuickTime directory that was causing all the problems. So I made a directory called “dead” in the /Library/QuickTime dir and moved the trouble codec file there. Now everything has been working fabulously. The trouble file is called “AviImporter-r7 (Intel).component”.