ism.dll causing blackscreens/driver crash on CoD/Cyberpunk

[Daethz]

Two crashes happen, either the Nvidia Driver crashes outright, or DWM crashes causing a blackscreen & recovery So far this has ONLY occured while playing CoD MW or Cyberpunk 2077

Reliability manager finally provided me with more information instead of just "dwm crashed"

It says ism.dll fault

 

The only threads I have found on the internet say do a fresh windows Install.

But I have one issue with that, this windows install practically is fresh, I haven't had this PC for 2 months and I fresh installed windows when I got it, and I haven't done any crazy modifications.

If I really need to reinstall windows it means that microsofts own installer is flawed and broke windows on Install the first time.

 

-I also recently Installed a brand new Corsair RMX 850w Power Supply replacing a EVGA G5 850w after I blamed that psu for this issue.

[Daethz]

Just found another thread that points at new Xbox Series X controllers being at fault.

-And every time it has crashed I was in fact using a series x controller to play. Hmm

 

Edit: Xbox Accessories app had a update for the controller.. I swear if this fixes the issue, y i k e s microsoft.

 

PSA Edit 6/27/2021: This was the cause, zero CTD's since updating controller firmware.

[TechieKeith]

I wanted to sign up to this forum to add that I was suffering from the same issue, with screen blackouts occurring when playing games, in both The Elder Scrolls Online and Minecraft - in the former case TES: Online is robust enough to recover, but in latter case this would cause the Minecraft application to hang.

 

I was tearing my hair out (what's left of it) trying to diagnose the issue: I had reinstalled Minecraft, downgraded the graphics drivers, reinstalled Windows, dusted the machine - I was fearful that my graphics card had developed a hardware fault and that I was going to be looking at an expensive replacement.

In the process of troubleshooting I discovered in the Event Viewer logs a number of entries like these below:

Event 0, Dwminit
 

The Desktop Window Manager process has exited. (Process exit code: 0x000000ff, Restart count: 1, Primary display device ID: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER)

Event 1000, Application Error
 

Faulting application name: dwm.exe, version: 10.0.19041.746, time stamp: 0x6be51595
Faulting module name: ism.dll, version: 10.0.19041.1288, time stamp: 0x2c4be888
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000088c1a
Faulting process id: 0x3580
Faulting application start time: 0x01d7cf4ead33bacc
Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\dwm.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ism.dll

These entries coincided with the times I was seeing these issues, and some of which were helpfully adjacent to some "Application Hang" messages relating to Minecraft. So I did a search online to see if anything came up related to this, and came across this thread. It was only then that I made the connection with my recent purchase of a new Xbox Series S/X controller - I would never in a million years have made the connection, if not for this thread.

So I went to the Microsoft Store to install the Xbox Accessories application and upgrade the game controller's firmware. A day or so later, admittedly it's early days but I haven't seen any screen glitches or application hangs or crashes since.

So thank you so much Daethz for creating this thread and saving me an unnecessary purchase and more stress. I owe you a beer.

And I wholly echo your sentiment - "Yikes, Microsoft!"

[f1rxf1y]

On 6/22/2021 at 11:36 AM, Daethz said:

Xbox Accessories app had a update for the controller.. I swear if this fixes the issue, y i k e s microsoft.

 

PSA Edit 6/27/2021: This was the cause, zero CTD's since updating controller firmware.

I would also like to confirm this fixed my issue with The Witcher 3 crashing due to dwm.exe/ism.dll. Thanks Daethz! I would love to know how the Xbox Series X controller firmware is causing this...

[Ulthael]

Never in a million years would I have expected it to be the new 20th Anniversary controller I recently bought causing my recent crashing issues. Thanks for finding and sharing the fix!