PTS client causing black screen video crash

Xinihp

I believe this has something to do with how the new client is killing Explorer.exe to work around a Chrome problem.

If I run my PC with only the live client everything is stable. My case air circulation is good and even after hours of play my video card never goes above 60c.

(Latest Windows 10, latest NVIDIA drivers.)

However, if I launch the PTS and exit, my PC will ALWAYS crash some time thereafter to a black screen. Everything else is still on, the sound of a Netflix video in the background keeps playing for example. However I must hard-reset the PC for it to reload the video driver.

I have tested this extensively. If I do not launch the PTS after rebooting, the black screen never happens. If I launch the PTS at any point, it will. It has nothing to do with heat or video load. It will crash doing nothing, or watching a Netflix video.

But after loading the PTS client and closing, something with the force-killing of Explorer.exe is not playing well with the NVIDIA control panel or ASUS fan control software or Windows itself somehow, and causes the entire video driver to do a hard unrecoverable crash.

Xinihp

As further confirmation this driver crash is directly related to the PTS client killing Explorer.exe...

On the advice of another forum-goer I have been testing manually killing eso64.exe through a task manager app (process explorer) instead of closing the game through menus. This bypasses the shutdown routine that killes Explorer.exe which prevents my NVIDIA control panel and ASUS video card fan control software from disappearing from my task tray.

It also prevents my system becoming unstable and the driver crashing to black screen.

Something else I noticed, is that the ASUS fan control software and NVIDIA control panel are not actually being shut down, but rather they are re-initialized when the Explorer shell is forced to re-initialize by this workaround.

The problem I believe is with the ASUS fan control software. I believe the software must be coded to properly re-initialize and this specific software may not be. The reason I say this is that after closing the PTS client normally and letting it kill Windows Explorer.exe, task manager now shows TWO instances of the fan monitor software running.

I think maybe what is happening is that the two instances are trying to hook into video card hardware controls and are not able to do so without memory corruption issues that eventually lead to a crash.

Trouble is, manually exiting the software, killing both instances in process explorer, and manually re-launching the fan control software will STILL show two instances. So once the game kills Explorer.exe I am stuck with a corrupted hardware hook on my fan control software until I manually reboot the machine.

This is obviously not an acceptable solution for the live client.

@ZOS_GinaBruno

Xinihp

Unfortunately this is still an issue on the latest PTS as of 6-6-2022, which means it is about to go live.

If I exit the game normally instead of killing it with task manager, my video will crash to a permanent black screen within minutes EVERY TIME and it requires a hard (hold power button) reboot to fix.

Is there no way to fix whatever you were running into with Chrome without force-closing Windows Explorer?