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Windows 7 dllhost.exe memory leak

Help!  dllhost.exe grows like the blob till resources are gone and thumbnails turn to icons, file searching slowed

When I search for images on my drives, the thumbnails do not work after only a little while of searching.  Also, the thumbnails on the desktop, or when searching open folders in windows, for images do not show up correctly.  In the Resource Monitor > Memory tab, I can see dllhost.exe is growing like the blob.  If I end the dllhost.exe process tree, things return to normal and my icons return to thumbnails little while, as dllhost.exe spawns again, and grows.  I can squash it like I'm playing whack-a-program over and over and eventually see the thumbnails.

     I have searched and only found the most mundane answers that are no help.  I have no virus.  My son has the same problem in with his Quad core I7 system running Windows 7 pro.  System caches are cleaned out regularly, and the system performs flawlessly in every other way.  This is not about video thumbnails.  This is about picture thumbnails like .jpg and .png 


Also, if I open a drive in my computer, the green search bar is very slow going to the right on each drive

System specifications
Windows 7 Pro (64 bit)
32GB DDR 3
AMD 8150 fx 8 core
Asus Motherboard
2 separate SLC SSDs, and 4 spindle drives
Kaspersky Internet Security 2014
50Mb cable internet connection

Answer
Answer
I have resolved the issue and optimized my computer by leaps and bounds.  Albeit, many computer problems are caused by human error, corrupted files, virus activity, overloads of this and that.  This is a new installation of Windows 7, with the above mentioned specs and respectable internet security suite.  I use the MVPS hosts file, that I add the updates to, and I update it myself, if something nasty comes up and I keep a good eye on my cookies regularly.  
   Here's what I did.   I ran Autoruns by Sysinternals and unchecked any references to Microsoft Office (Office still works fine, btw).  Since I don't use adobe acrobat to read PDFs, I unchecked the autoruns there also (I use foxit)  I believe there are many items in that list that I could have unchecked, but if I wasn't exactly sure what it was, I left it alone.  I only went by what I saw in the description and location.  I recommend this to anyone having problems of this nature and general slow down of their system.  Be careful, and try to understand what you're unchecking as a program that automatically starts in the background when Windows starts.  The whole process took less than 20 minutes of going through the list for me. 
   All of my thumbnails work perfect, videos, .jpg, .png, etc.   

Note:
  I do not believe that any updates to my computer caused this problem as I originally proposed, as I installed windows and completely shut off all MS updates, but yet the problem started right after one of my other software installations.  

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I recently bought a new computer with windows professional loaded.  No Microsoft office products on this PC.

I downloaded Adobe reader.  Then was asked to update adobe on 9/27/14.  After the update my cpu went bonkers with dllhost.exe running amuck.  I removed adobe and that fixed the problem.  The last update seemed to be the culprit.

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Last updated June 21, 2023 Views 75,265 Applies to: