COM Surrogate high CPU usage after downloading MKV

Sacco Belmonte

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Mar 22, 2021, 8:11:51 PM3/22/21

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I used VDH regularly for years to save guitar backing tracks to practice.

Today I got one video, I always select "download" so I can reencode later if I want with my apps.

Strangely, after the file was downloaded I got high CPU usage in the "COM surrogate" windows process. Using one core at 100%

I killed the process many times but it kept coming back even after closing FireFox and making sure there was no process related to VDH running.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

Sacco Belmonte

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Mar 22, 2021, 10:40:30 PM3/22/21

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It is something running behind a "dllhost" instance. Even after rebooting it immediately kicked in, sounds awfully like a trojan and I know it came from VDH cause it happened immediately after getting a MKV video.

I'm still investigating. I wanna know how to see what is running inside a dllhost instance.

Sacco Belmonte

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Mar 22, 2021, 11:13:17 PM3/22/21

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I think I know what happened now, so in case it happens to you you know what it is:

VDH placed the MKV file in the desktop, and since it was badly downloaded there was no way to create its thumbnail. The system was trying very hard unsuccessfully to do so, hence the dllhost using 100% from one core.

Previous to that, I traced the dllhost process ID, googled it and found two forum threads that linked it to thumbnail management.

As soon as I deleted the video file from the desktop the dllhost instance killed itself.

So it was no virus or trojan.

... ...

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Jun 20, 2021, 9:49:14 AM6/20/21

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This is similar to the problem I've been experiencing. Is it a problem with Windows or VDH?

In my case though, I saved the download to my Videos folder, not the desktop. I'm wondering if Sacco or anyone else has experienced this problem and been able to prevent the cpu takeover?

dange halake

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Jul 19, 2021, 1:39:56 PM7/19/21

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rd7...@gmail.com

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Jul 20, 2021, 2:51:44 AM7/20/21

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glad you fixed this, thanks for the feedback.

jerome

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