If you poke around in your Task Manager, there’s a good chance you’ll see one or more “COM Surrogate” processes running on a Windows PC. These processes have the file name “dllhost.exe”, and are part of the Windows operating system. You’ll see them on Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, and even earlier versions of Windows.
This article is part of our ongoing series explaining various processes found in Task Manager, like Runtime Broker, svchost.exe, dwm.exe, ctfmon.exe, rundll32.exe, Adobe_Updater.exe, and many others. Don’t know what those services are? Better start reading!
What Is COM Surrogate (dllhost.exe)?
COM stands for Component Object Model. This is an interface Microsoft introduced back in 1993 that allows developers to create “COM objects” using a variety of different programming languages. Essentially, these COM objects plug into other applications and extend them.
For example, the Windows file manager uses COM objects to create thumbnail images of images and other files when it opens a folder. The COM object handles processing images, videos, and other files to generate the thumbnails. This allows File Explorer to be extended with support for new video codecs, for example.
However, this can lead to problems. If a COM object crashes, it will take down its host process. At one point, it was common for these thumbnail-generating COM objects to crash and take down the entire Windows Explorer process with them.
To fix this sort of problem, Microsoft created the COM Surrogate process. The COM Surrogate process runs a COM object outside the original process that requested it.
If the COM object crashes, it will only take down the COM Surrogate process and the original host process won’t crash. For example, Windows…The post What Is “COM Surrogate” (dllhost.exe) and Why Is It Running on My PC? appeared first on FeedBox.