dllhost.exe eating up CPU

Question

I have Vista Home Premium with a E6600 Core 2 Duo (@ 2.4GHz) and 2GB RAM.   Yet, when I look at the Windows Task Manager, it shows my CPU usage constantly hovering around 50-60%, even if I'm not doing anything.   The culprit is something called dllhost.exe, which is shown using 50% of my CPU. It's described as a COM Surrogate.   I briefly searched Google and got conflicting answers. Some sites said that dllhost.exe is a file that's a vital part of Windows. Other sites said it may be a virus or spyware. I've run all my virus and spyware programs and they've come up with nothing.   I can't imagine why any component of Vista would require half of my CPU's performance.   Any help?

kirkd · Answer

COM Surrogate is used for videos. You could try to disable it in the Task Manager to see if that helps. There are problems with older versions of Nero and other video programs in vista. Message Edited by KirkD on 10-17-2008 10:13 PM

njeffrey · Answer

I noticed exactly the same problem (I am running Vista Business 32 bit on an E521). Sometimes I would end up with a dllhost.exe process running and using up 50% of my CPU. It was basically using up one core completely so I guess it would use 100% on a single core machine. Eventually I noticed that it started doing this whenever I hit the browse button on an upload page (I am using IE7, haven't tried firefox or anything else yet). For example, if I am sending an email from googlemail and I click the 'Attach a file' link and then start looking around for the file I want to attach I can then see the dllhost.exe appear and start eating CPU. I don't have to actually select anything, just look around some directories. But it doesn't happen if I just pop up the selection box and then immediately cancel it.   Anyway, I have found that if I just kill the offending dllhost.exe from the task manager it goes away and there don't seem to be any adverse effects. So now I just keep an eye on the CPU meter and kill the dllhost.exe whenever it goes bananas.

mwmcginn · Answer

Same problem here... any solutions?

minllfixit · Answer

It seems this is a common problem, I too have been plagued by it, tried looking up blogs and forums but alot of conflicting ideas. I too have ended the process in task manager and the cpu immediately calms down, don't know if this is the right thing to do though. Doesn't seem to have any ill effects, will post if it does.

Windows General

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