And when it crashes, it just means that Explorer's worst fears were realized. That way, if it crashes, it's the COM Surrogate sacrificial process that crashes instead of me process. To do this: Press CRTL + Shift + ESC keys on your keyboard to open Task Manager. In other words, the COM Surrogate is the I don't feel good about this code, so I'm going to ask COM to host it in another process. To exit completely COM surrogate application, you need to do that via Task Manager. When the thumbnail extractor crashes, the crash destroys the COM Surrogate process instead of Explorer. Explorer has decided to absorb the performance penalty in exchange for the improved reliability resulting in moving these dodgy bits of code out of the main Explorer process. It does this because Explorer has learned not to trust thumbnail extractors they have a poor track record for stability. Classic Start Menu 0 0.3 MB l> COM Surrogate 0 1.0 MB l> coM Surrogate oar. If you go to a folder with thumbnails enabled, Explorer will fire off a COM Surrogate and use it to compute the thumbnails for the documents in the folder. When Programs Die: The Task Manager Here are three ways to do it: ' Invoke. Explorer uses the COM Surrogate when extracting thumbnails, for example. The COM Surrogate is a fancy name for Sacrificial process for a COM object that is run outside of the process that requested it. Its normal to see multiple instances of it.
