I have several mp3s with embedded cover art. For some of these mp3s the album art viewer (of the new default ui) shows a textmessage: "Gdiplus Error (2)"

Any ideas what's going on? I suspect some corrupted image data inside the mp3 but since I have no experience with external tagging tools I can't check this...

I just recently got this, too. Mine was with an external file, however, and it doesn't do it with that file every time, either.
In fact it only did it one time I had foobar launched. Resarted and the problem went away. (not a very useful bug report, I know)

Restarting fb2k did not solve the problem for me

I've come across this randomly as well...

Just to clarify: for certain mp3s it's definitely not a random error, it appears every time I click on such a file.

Can you verify if you have GdiPlus.dll in your C:\Windows\System32 or somewhere under C:\Windows\WinSxS\ ? I have seen this error when your system is missing this file, you may want to run windows update or manually copy it over if it is missing.

I have the same error with this podcast: festoon - po dictionary podcast. I checked and I have gdiplus.dll in my Windows directory.

I have at least one version of this file in
c:\windows\WinSxS\x86_Microsoft.Windows.GdiPlus_6595b64144ccf1df_1.0.2600.2180_x-ww_522f9f82

This file shows the same behaviour as my (corrupted?) files

The error message is usually caused by a broken ID3v2 tag or an invalid cover embedded to the file. It has nothing to do with an old version of the DLL.