Why does dllhost.exe Com surrogate consumes memory untill crash

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)

               

Good luck guys.

Thanks... yes the thumbnails cause the problem... and only for 3D MP4 files created by my Sony camera.  Sad that MS vetting of "improvements" cripple a system.

 

Thanks to all.

Same here: new Panasonic and Sony 3D files cause the leak.  Old 2D files do not.  And this just started about a week ago.  Only problem is with MP4 3D files.

Rats!

I don't think it is entirely MS fault ever since the Digital rights movement (DRM) they have had to patch a multitude of files I guess We can blame the media thieves for making all of Our lives more difficult.

They will work it out sooner or later.

What I ended up doing is moving the 3D files to a new folder and setting the folder to show details.

It allows me to at least work with 1 file at a time, I just need to remember to kill the process when done.

               

Good luck guys.

Thanks... yes the thumbnails cause the problem... and only for 3D MP4 files created by my Sony camera.  Sad that MS vetting of "improvements" cripple a system.

Thanks to all.

I found a solution but it makes windows not so secure.

I did a reformat and fresh install and did not allow windows update, so far so good.

Being as I did not let updates happen the system is at risk on the net.

So I'm guessing that there is nothing wrong with my PC gear and it has to be some thing with the OS after security updates.

I have read on other help sites they are turning off UAC and it seems to fix the bug, my problem with that is it makes a large gap in system security.

I have installed all my favorite codec's supporting *.mov *.QT *.flv *.mp4 *.Mpeg *.avi *.ogg and so on

still no problems.

Wish me luck.

Ok guys I let widows auto update and the problem returned, so it seems at least for my setup that a security update has changed how the thumbnail creation works.

I'm guessing sooner or later it will be fixed by another security update.

Good luck guys.