COM Surrogate Stopped Working

Is COM Surrogate a virus?

The short answer is no. COM Surrogate processes themselves cannot be viruses. However, viruses and malware can disguise themselves as a COM Surrogate process.

Legitimacy of COM Surrogate Cheacking

Since these processes are genuine components of Windows, they are widely used by cybercriminals. This has consequences – like the COM Surrogate having high CPU consumption and creating duplicates in the Task Manager.

A simple way to check its legitimacy is:

Open Windows Task Manager by right-clicking on the taskbar and clicking Task Manager.

Find the COM Surrogate processes and then right-click to Open File Location.

Processes are legitimate if they are located in C:/Windows\System32 or C:/winnt/system32.

There are many reasons for these errors to occur. The most common are:

--A third-party program incorrectly registered COM objects or they did not work correctly (if they were incompatible with current versions of Windows, outdated software).

--If the problem occurs during drawing thumbnails in Explorer, it's because of outdated or incorrectly working codecs.

--Can be caused by viruses or malware, as well as damage to Windows System Files.

Common Errors You May Encounter:

COM Surrogate high CPU, disk usage

COM Surrogate is not responding, freeze

COM Surrogate virus

COM Surrogate taking memory

COM Surrogate always running

COM Surrogate stopped working

COM Surrogate keeps crashing, opening

1. Update Codecs

A manual method to solve this error is to update all the Codecs of Windows (7, 8 or 10) to their latest updated versions. You can download and install your latest Windows Codec Pack from here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=507

Windows 7 Codec Pack: https://www.windows7codecs.com/    

Windows 10 Codec Pack: http://www.windows8codecs.com/

2. Reset Internet Explorer

The issue can also be caused due to cached files that were corrupt. In this instance, it's be best to reset IE.

Hold the Windows Key and Press R. In the run dialog, type inetcpl.cpl and click OK. Go to the Advanced Tab and choose Reset.

Select Delete Personal Settings and hit the reset button again. Once you've done all that, reboot your PC and test it out.

3. Check Disk For Errors

If this error occurs when opening files saved in a particular DRIVE other then C:\ then you should check that drive for errors. If you don't have any additional drives, just check the C:\ drive.

Hold the Windows Key and press E. On Windows 7/Vista you will see the drives listed.

On Windows 8/10, chose This PC from the left pane to view the drives. Right-click on the Selected Hard disk drive that you want to check and then select “Properties”.  

3. Click the Tools tab from the top and then click Check Now under Error-Checking. Check both the Options and the click Start.

4. Re-register the DLLs

1. Run the following commands in an escalated command prompt. Click Start, type cmd, and right click on the “cmd” program from the search results. Then select Run as Administrator.

2. In the Command Prompt window, type the following commands and press the        Enter key one by one:

regsvr32 vbscript.dll

regsvr32.jscript.dll

5. Rollback to the Previous Display Adapter Driver

To do this, hold the Windows Key and Press R. In the run dialog, type hdwwiz.cpl and click OK.

Scroll to the Display Adapters section in the Device Manager. Right click on it and select Properties.

Click Roll Back Driver. In some cases, this option is grayed out in that case go to display adaptor and Roll Back Driver.

6. Add dllhost.exe to the DEP(Data Execution Prevention) Exception

Go to Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced System settings> Performance settings > Data Execution Prevention.

--Select “Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select:”

--Click on “Add“ and navigate to C:\Windows\System32\dllhost.exe on 32-bit Windows Machine and on a 64-bit machine, add C:\Windows\SysWOW64\dllhost.exe

--After adding dllhost.exe to the exception list, Apply changes or click OK.

7. Switch to List or Details view / disable thumbnails

We have already discussed that COM Surrogate is in charge of your thumbnails. In order to avoid problems with it, you can disable thumbnails.

In addition, you can switch to List or Details view by doing the following:

Open File Explorer.

Click the View tab and choose the List or Details option.

8. Update your Antivirus

It has been reported that certain antivirus software, such as Kaspersky antivirus, can sometimes cause issues with the COM Surrogate process.

In order to fix those issues, you should install the latest version of your current antivirus software.

### In my Case Roll Back DIsplay Driver Solver this Problem.