Mystery COM Surrogate crashes

Pirx · 08 Nov 2017

Does anyone at all have any good suggestions on troubleshooting these?

I seem to be getting these at random times, with no rhyme or reason. The faulting module is quite often, but not always mso20win32client.dll, but I've seen mso30win32client.dll once, or none indicated at all. The crashes can appear right after a restart, but sometimes they happen hours later when the machine is idle, doing nothing in particular at all. These events have started to appear a few weeks back, and the only system changes that occurred right before this started was an automatic Office 365 update.

I am unable so far to correlate the crashes with any particular activity or program running on the machine, and I do not notice any lack of functionality before or after the crashes. I went through the task manager log, and I checked if I could correlate the crashes with other messages in the event viewer, with no success. They also happen infrequently: I can go up to three or even four days without issue, only to see one of these pop up again in my event viewer. I have never seen more than two of them a day.

So, does anybody have any suggestions as to how I might identify the culprit?

P.S.: And please, for the love of god, don't suggest running the system file checker. In all my years of Windows computing I have never, ever seen a single problem, nor have I found any evidence on the internet of non-catastrophic problems like this being linked to corrupt system files. All cases I have ever heard of or seen where sfc found anything were related to systems that had been completely hosed, either by the user or through obvious hardware failures...

bro67 · 08 Nov 2017

That problem is related to Office. Helps to know what version that you have, along with have you tried going in Programs and Features, to do a repair? Have you tried doing a search and read those posts to try the fixes listed.

Pirx · 08 Nov 2017

Like I said, Office 365, which gets continuous updates to the latest version of everything. So, essentially Office 2016.
Repair does nothing. I'm not even sure it's Office that's the culprit; this is Windows we are talking about, everything could be linked to anything...

bro67 · 09 Nov 2017

Pirx said:

Like I said, Office 365, which gets continuous updates to the latest version of everything. So, essentially Office 2016.
Repair does nothing. I'm not even sure it's Office that's the culprit; this is Windows we are talking about, everything could be linked to anything...

Hmm, that is the brand name, not the actual version that it is going by. If you look at your list of updates and noticed that the problems started when the last set of updates happened, you go in and uninstall those updates and the problem magically goes away.

Everyone that has dealt with Microsoft's products since the first day they pushed MSDos out, knows that they have a tendency to screw things up royally. That is why people make backups, make sure that System Restore is on and that there are restore points made to allow you to roll back out of a bad update to something.

The problem is again with 365, not with Windows 10, if you did a search for that filename. You want to blame Windows, that is fine. Those who know better, are going to point fingers at a bad update for once again, which is Office.