Suddenly my Microsoft Windows 7 started to throw “COM Surrogate” error when I try to view any picture with its built-in Windows Photo Viewer. The advices which you can find in the internet says to reinstall Nero or codec packs. I have neither of them, but only more or less clean Windows installation and all its usual updates.
In a nutshell, “COM Surrogate” is DllHost.exe process created by any other process, which wants to execute some code from any DLL (code library), but it doesn’t want to execute the code in its own space since it does not trust the code in terms of stability. So it creates a “surrogate” to execute the code. If that DLL code dies during execution, only DllHost.exe surrogate process dies (giving us this “COM Surrogate has stopped working” error) and the initial process stills alive. If this killing code were executed in the initial process directly, then the initial process dies instead of surrogate.
Though actually we have no need to care what it is and what all this means and how things work. We want our photos being shown.