SOLVED COM Surrogate Runaway Process, Windows Explorer and Office 2016 File Problems

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I have a new problem which I discovered today which emerged when trying to save a Word 2016 document as a PDF where Word hung, using one CPU core 100% and never to come back. To check that it was not an Office problem , I copied the file to another computer, where it work just fine (under Office 2013). However in copying , I created a new folder on the network share, and tried to rename it. The rename took over a minute to happen. I then decide to get the file properties, and this took several minutes to pop up, both on the local copy and the network share. In trying to work out what was going on, I noticed that as soon as I selected Properties, COM Surrogate grows very quickly to several GB in size (about 11GB) and uses 100% CPU. It sits there for several minutes in that state and then finally dies, after which the File Properties dialog pops up. I suspect the other issues are all related to this, but have not confirmed the same behaviour of COM Surrogate. I did notice that Word followed the same path of growing to about 11 GB very quickly using 100% CPU, and then shrinking in size back to about 230 MB and 50% CPU when trying to save the PDF. I am running Windows 10 Pro Version 1607 Build 14393.693.

So what have I done with no success.
1. Reboot
2. Re-installed Office 2016
3. Run sfc /verifyonly which return no problems.

I managed to capture the attached information through Process Explorer on COM Surrogate (dllhost.exe) when it was displaying this behaviour, which someone may be able to decipher.

I'm now at a bit of a loss what to do next, or how to track down what is causing this. Any suggestions or solutions on a similar issue will be greatly appreciated.
 

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bassfisher6522

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Have you updated your Office suite 2016? My current build is version 1701 build 7755.2060 and I'm currently in the middle of updating it.
 
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I will mark this one as solved. The COM Surrogate runway was being caused by Acronis. I uninstalled and then re-installed Acronis, and the File Properties no longer caused the COM Surrogate issue. Prior to that I had tried.
1. Latest Windows Updates
2. Re-installed Office 2016 completely.
3. Forced a rebuild of the icon and thumbnail databases

with no joy until the Acronis re-install.

The Word to PDF issue is still there, but only with certain documents. Works for some, but not others. I now suspect it is a Word 2016 bug. Now how to report bugs to Microsoft.......
 

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