Why does dllhost.exe Com surrogate consumes memory untill crash

Hi.

First of all, I apologize for my English. I am from Brazil, and just "felt" on this topic with a Google search. And I did not read all answers to check if the problem is solved, I just want to help with something I got here today.

In my case, the problem appears to be with thumbnails generation, like some of you wrote here, but I don't work with 3D videos here, only 2D, most MP4 and MKV encoding. The main problem were the codecs I have installed here. I don't know wich ones you have, but is a good idea to uninstall them, restart your PC, use CCleaner to clean thumbnail cache and junk files. After that open Task Manager and check if the process is running. If it is not, just try to install the codecs again and check if there are newer versions of them.

I hope it was usefull in any way.

Hi.

First of all, I apologize for my English. I am from Brazil, and just "felt" on this topic with a Google search. And I did not read all answers to check if the problem is solved, I just want to help with something I got here today.

In my case, the problem appears to be with thumbnails generation, like some of you wrote here, but I don't work with 3D videos here, only 2D, most MP4 and MKV encoding. The main problem were the codecs I have installed here. I don't know wich ones you have, but is a good idea to uninstall them, restart your PC, use CCleaner to clean thumbnail cache and junk files. After that open Task Manager and check if the process is running. If it is not, just try to install the codecs again and check if there are newer versions of them.

I hope it was usefull in any way.

To recap the issue:

The dllhost can eat up all memory till the system crashes. This could have several causes, one is a bug in the thumbnailsystem. If the deactivation of the thumbnailsystem can fix the memory leak, you know for sure. (One would probably have to reboot or kill the process to see any changes)

The update KB2670838 which also gets installed along with IE10 (!) has several side effects. One of them is the introduction of a memory leak when trying to generate a thumbnail for certain mp4 files, typically 3D Side by Side. Search for files which should have a thumbnail but have a standard icon (the current file causing the leak will also be unmoveable, undeleteable etc). The thumbnail cache plays a role in this too. If you have valid thumbnails for a file and install an update or codecs or would like to test this, there will be no error till the next time the thumbnail is actually created.

It is possible, that there are other causes for these problems as well and it is possible that not all systems are prone to that memory leak. Other side effects of the update point to a combo of intel and amd hardware.

--

As for my system, there is no combo, only amd here. And either hiding the 3D-mp4 (rename so no thumb will be generated) or deinstalling KB2670838 works. Because yet another side effect of this update broke functions of my tv card software, I prefer to not install the update. There is KB2834140, an update to the update, which was aimed to repair other errors caused by KB2670838 but this did nothing to the issue with thumbnails.

Downloaded a 3D Trailer in MP4, side by side coded. My Standard MP4-Icon was shown and nothing out of the ordinary happened for a while. Except moving the file seemed impossible, but copying to another hdd worked.

A while later I got a system freeze (during a flash vid in fullscreen), complete with NumLock dead. But the system recovered a few minutes later.

Then came a Message, that I was out of memory, which actually was true, according to the Task Manager.

Culprit was dllhost.exe which I could watch hogging all Memory it could get. After killing it with the Task Manager it started over again, leaking Memory every second.

Searching the net suggeted something to do with the Thumbnails and I also found this Thread.

I renamed the Trailer's extenstion from mp4 to unknown. The action could only be completed by killing dllhost.exe again. After doing that for both copies of the 3d-mp4, the Memory situation was normal again.

Conclusion: Kudos to my Win7 64 Home Premium for actually recovering from such a situation without reboot or blue screen, shame on the programmers of a non critical background process like thumbnails to allow for critically failing the system by infinite memory leak and not every malfunction is a malware or virus.

WORKAROUND at least for me: Changing the extension to a video extension that the system does not generate thumbnails for. In my case .mkv (not tested with Windows Media Player as I use other players)

Thanks Simon, your quick fix works perfectly. It solved my problem instantly and i was able to delete the file after changing the extension and now everything is back to normal :D

Hi All,

The below options you too can try , I tested and working fine with my Win 7 64 bit OS.

Said issue was exists with my machine and trying to find a solution as this cannot be cleared up by re-installation of OS / any Malware check / Antivirus Tool scanning.

However this has been resolved ultimately with Installation of Media Preview  64 Bit.

Now am completely free from this long term headache .....!!!!!

Steps to be followed

1: Download the tool from http://www.babelsoft.net/products.htm#download according to the OS versions.

2: Install it & Reboot your machine.

This will give you a total freedom from dllhost.exe max memory utilization and deadlock .......!!!!

 

Hi All,

 

The below options you too can try , I tested and working fine with my Win 7 64 bit OS.

 

Said issue was exists with my machine and trying to find a solution as this cannot be cleared up by re-installation of OS / any Malware check / Antivirus Tool scanning.

 

However this has been resolved ultimately with Installation of Media Preview  64 Bit.

 

Now am completely free from this long term headache .....!!!!!

 

Steps to be followed

 

1: Download the tool from http://www.babelsoft.net/products.htm#download according to the OS versions.

 

2: Install it & Reboot your machine.

 

This will give you a total freedom from dllhost.exe max memory utilization and deadlock .......!!!!