ShadowFX 1.12 breaks newer Win10 builds on my machine

from Stardock Forums

Disclaimer: Yes I know Insider Builds aren't going to be supported, I'm just posting this as a bug report and to help others.

In the last three builds of Windows 10: 14942, 14946, 14951, ShadowFX has broken my Windows install in that when the ShadowFX service loads, dwm.exe crashes, crashing that user session to end, then dwm restarts, crashes, restarts, indefinitely, making the system unusable.

During Windows upgrades this happens at the 76% point, immediately killing the setup session and spawning into the dwm crashes.  When I disabled the ShadowFX service, the upgrade was successful but the problem reappeared by starting the service.

I tested this in a Hyper-V virtual machine and the problem did not occur there.  It may only affect certain video cards/drivers.

Video card: AMD Radeon HD 5700
Driver: 15.201.1151.1008, 11/4/2015 (installed automatically from Windows Update)

shadowfx
8,943 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

I have checked here with a 14942 VM and am not experiencing any issues in a VM.

It could be a problem with video drivers themselves.  Is there any information in the eventlog about the crash?

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

The event log shows that after 8 DWM crashes (event source: Dwminit) it gives up on the video driver and switches over to the basic driver (Microsoft Basic Display Driver), where it still keeps crashing.  I wondered about this, so I switched to the basic driver to start and was still able to trigger the problem.

The basic driver doesn't work in a Hyper-V VM so I couldn't test that there.

I assume the dump gets deleted because it gets sent up to Microsoft, but here's the remnants of the crash:

Description
Faulting Application Path:    C:\Windows\System32\dwm.exe

Problem signature
Problem Event Name:    APPCRASH
Application Name:    dwm.exe
Application Version:    10.0.14951.1000
Application Timestamp:    5801a3f9
Fault Module Name:    StackHash_4d48
Fault Module Version:    0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp:    00000000
Exception Code:    c0000005
Exception Offset:    PCH_AC_FROM_ntdll+0x00000000000A31B4
OS Version:    10.0.14951.2.0.0.256.48
Locale ID:    1033
Additional Information 1:    4d48
Additional Information 2:    4d4806caf25fc34e8631c08c216161a4
Additional Information 3:    3877
Additional Information 4:    3877c59385bbf1a1908f97559e5245a5

Extra information about the problem
Bucket ID:    e897d784e3924225f394de9f5dd813d1 (120577937786)

Each is always that same PCH_AC_FROM_ntdll function at that address.  Since I assume ShadowFX works by hooking to the DWM using documented or undocumented means, I would guess that either they've changed a function or have introduced a bug.  Still pretty early in RS2 dev cycle though if it's shipping in March though.

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