It seems like using this will cause the functions that retrieve assembly resources to fail, intermittently and rarely, with an SEHException that has the error code E_FAIL. It's very odd and hard to reproduce, and the SEHException seems to be treated as a 'corupted state exception', so you can't catch it normally.
The best answer to this is simply not to use this method anyway; there is no real need for it in most cases. Instead should set up a manifest to do it, as desribed in this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb773175(v=vs.85).aspx
The difference, I suspect, is that with a manifest you load the correct version of comctl32.dll at startup, and with the method call you wind up changing which comctl32 you are using 'midstream'.