Investigating Search Protocol Host Crashes on Win11 24h2 with Enterprise Vault and MS Office Module Issues

A user asked about instances of search protocol host crashing or spawning excessive numbers of processes on win11 24h2 machines, potentially related to an email archiving tool called enterprise vault. Another user mentioned seeing similar crashes with MS Office module mso20win32client.dll and suggested checking for updates to fix the issue. The Nov 2026 fix for Outlook terminating unexpectedly may also help. @member https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/monthly-enterprise-channel#version-2508-october-16

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Hello – i searched around and didnt see anything but curious if anyone else is running win11 24h2 and having a lot of instances of search protocol host crashing or spawning an excessive number of instances? We are seeing that it may be due to an interaction with an email archiving tool called enterprise vault, but looking for any other correlation/validation. TIA for any input

Jason, we have about 2000 Win11 24h2 machines and we haven’t noticed anything like that over here

what is the process name and process version of the crashed instances? @member

Thanks Dustin!

Yoni – its searchprotocolhost.exe – we are finding it is spinning up hundreds of extra processes. The issue manifested by outlook crashing and not reopening. We have narrowed down the not re-opening to lock files on enterprise vault, and it may actually be the integration enterprise vault has with wds (it has a handler to tell wds to index its location)

Hey @member

For what its worth, we are seeing quite a few searchprotocolhost.exe crashes with the mso20win32client.dll MS Office module.

Not sure its related, but there was a big issue with MS Office sep 2025 release that caused a lot of MS Office apps to crash (mainly winword.exe), this issue was fixed with the Oct 2026 release – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/monthly-enterprise-channel#version-2508-october-16

(and I see a Nov 2026 fix – "Fixed an issue that caused Outlook to terminate unexpectedly when starting.")

Not sure this is related to the search protocol host crashing, but worth checking if machines with the latest Office 365 Nov patch still exhibit this issue

hopefully this helps

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