If you’re worried about COM Surrogate, chances are you’ve come across it in your task manager and are worried it might be a virus. Before you go formatting your machine or replacing hardware, you should know that it’s almost certainly not a virus. And in either case, you don’t want to delete it. The COM Surrogate process is needed to load DLL files and is actually quite important.
How to Fix COM Surrogate High CPU Usage Malware in Windows 10/11
COM Surrogate is an umbrella name for a process called dllhost.exe that has been with Windows since Windows 7, and is also present in Windows 8 and Windows 10. You can see this for yourself if you open Task Manager, right-click (or tap and hold) COM Surrogate, and then select Go to details. It is running under your user name, rather than System or Local Service.
COM Surrogate is a collective name for a number of processes that perform a number of tasks and effectively isolate DLLs from the main Windows File Explorer. It can be used for fairly mundane tasks, such as retrieving thumbnails for images or documents in a folder. The reason for this is that if something goes wrong with those DLLs, such as them crashing for some reason, they won't take Windows Explorer with them.
It is essentially Windows' way of isolating itself from problematic bits of code that can cause stability issues. COM surrogates effectively make your Windows PC more stable.
