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