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Anamnesis

of a kooky software developer with megalomaniacal inferiority complex

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COM Surrogate has stopped working in Windows Photo Viewer

28.04.2011 by Sergey Vasilyev 47 Comments

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.

[Read more…]

Posted in: Knowhows Tagged: bug, com, dll, error, fix, image, photo, surrogate, viewer, windows

Categories and Priorities of Personal Files

03.01.2011 by Sergey Vasilyev Leave a Comment

As I’ve written earlier in my story of files losses and methods to prevent this, I’ve tried to keep all possible information throughout the time and space. But soon I understood this information is not homogeneous and different kinds of files differ significantly in the manner they should be handled.

So I decided to make some background classification and prioritizing of files I have and I work with. Well, actually, it was not done strictly before my researches, as science requires, but evaluated during this research. But who cares.

Classes of information are formed on how I do handle it, how I do access or modify it, and how I do share or do not share it. Priorities are subjectively weighted based on the cost of the information loss and leak, and these costs include both money and torments.

Here they are: [Read more…]

Posted in: Life Hacks Tagged: archive, backup, category, code, document, exchange, file, lifehack, media, password, photo, priority, source, system

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