What is COM Surrogate?
COM Surrogate is a catchall name for processes called dllhost.exe that separates Windows Explorer from individual DLL hosts that have the potential to crash. In particular, DLLs that deal with media thumbnails. There are many others, but that’s one of the most common. COM Surrogate makes it so that if any of those DLL files crash, the files don’t crash the entire Windows Explorer. Think of it as a first line of defense for system stability.
What Causes COM Surrogate to Stop Working?
The ‘COM Surrogate has stopped working’ error doesn’t appear to stop you from doing much. However, its interruption can be irritating, and it’s not often obvious what caused the problem. Nailing down the precise cause of why a DLL host isn’t responding isn’t always easy. There are a few ways it can go wrong. The most typical being there has been some corruption in a codec that allows the thumbnails of certain media to display. In other cases, a corrupted display driver can be the cause of errors on a storage drive. In some niche cases, there have been reports of specific applications, like Adobe Photoshop and Nero disk burner, causing COM Surrogate to stop working. That’s less likely, and we advocate some of the more general fixes below before pointing the finger at any particular application. If you recently installed a new app and experience an error, rolling back to before you installed it can be a good first step.
Fix COM Surrogate Has Stopped Working in Windows 10
Without an apparent cause for COM Surrogate errors, it’s often good to try some general fixes that can fix an array of problems first. After any of the following fixes, reboot your system and repeat the steps to trigger the COM Surrogate problem. If all is well, it shouldn’t appear again. If this doesn’t fix the error and you think updating to a recent driver may have caused it, download an older driver you know works and install that instead.
