8.2 Mixed Results with Computer Crashes

[AlbanRampon]

I have analyzed the WUDFHost memory dumps.
Can you confirm their timestamp matches when your machine was hanging?

I see a few things in them. DisplayLink driver is terminated when trying to retry initialization. I've created a bug report for engineering to look at that because, we should not have to retry in the first place. The fact that the dump is created when retrying is a known Windows 10 Anniversary Update limitation. Microsoft kindly changed their USB driver to allow us to retry on Windows 10 Creators Update to work around a hardware issue observed in very old hardware from a specific company.
But all that has no reason to hang the machine: terminating a driver is a normal thing. It should just somewhat gracefully recover.

I don't see anything about the Ethernet driver. Would you have more information on that?

Kind regards,
Alban

My Ref - 25257 FxUsbUmFormatRequest WUDFHost DMP on Dell D1000

[jeremy]

Hey Alban,

I recently finished testing with a group of about 30 testers over the last week. My testers are still seeing issues, but the driver has helped some people, particularly with CPU usage! Here are some of the scenarios that I have seen with users with issues:
1. Screens freeze (image locked on screens) and dock crashes. When the user opens up the laptop, the laptop has gone to using the built in display and, if the laptop is using Ethernet through the dock, it is on wifi.
2. Screens freeze (image locked on screens) and dock crashes. When the user opens up the laptop, the laptop's built in display is black. I am able to ping the machine (users had ethernet wired directly into the laptop) and start remote sessions (RDP and SCCM), but the screens remain black, even on the remote sessions. The user must manually force the computer to shutdown.
3. Screens freeze (image locked on screens) and dock crashes. The screens eventually resume and all functionality is normal. The duration is about 15 seconds. I should note that it is rare that the dock gracefully recovers like this.

I also want to mention that we have been telling our users to unplug/replug the USB connection into the laptop. In most cases, this will allow the users to regain full functionality in scenario #1. I did notice that some users have complete USB lock up, meaning that the laptop will not reinitialize the dock on any of the USB ports until the PC has rebooted.

Regarding the print screen, I had the tester take a print screen of when she saw the issue, paste it into Word, and then email it to me. The defect did not exist within the print screen. My tester did note that when she took a screenshot that the corrupted content briefly materialized, but it would immediately go back to the corrupted image as soon as she attempted to refresh the screen. I attempted to update to the latest Intel graphics driver, but I was unable to upgrade using the EXE or the ZIP version of the driver. Windows would not recognize the ZIP version as a newer version than what is installed. The driver version is up to date as far as what is on Dell's site (4574).
Regarding the Creator's update, the enterprise ISO is not available until May 1st. I configured our SCCM infrastructure to do in-place feature upgrades, but our company-wide patching is occurring next week so I will need to wait to do the upgrades since I'll need to reset WSUS's synchronization with SCCM. As soon as it is available, I will put the creator's update out to a test group of users.

For the timestamps, I collected that information at the same time that the PC experienced the dock crash so those are accurate. For the ethernet errors, I'll comb through my tester's logs and get screenshots of those and attach them to this thread. The errors are mainly for NDIS and DLCDCNCM where the Dell Giga Ethernet adapter encounters an internal error, but I'll gather the exact logs. We haven't done any performance tuning with group policy/registry to force these adapters remain powered on at all times or disabling IPv6 or anything like that. My thought was maybe that the OS was powering the adapter off at times and thus disrupting the DisplayLink driver. I had a user unplug the ethernet from her dock and the dock crashed as soon as she had done that, so perhaps there's a correlation.

Lastly, I did want to mention again that my organization functions similarly to a call center. We use on-premise Skype for Business as our telephony solution and our users typically speak up about the dock crashes because they frequently occur immediately before/after or on a call. Do you have any known issues with Skype for Business and docks? If not, do you believe these to be just coincidences, or is there anything I can do to test?

Please let me know if there's anything I can provide or any testing I can do!

Thanks!

[jeremy]

Attached are the screenshots of the ethernet errors we see periodically. These are from the same user's machine and should be a few days after he got the new driver.

[jeremy]

Attached is the ZIP file of one of my users who just experienced the screen corruption issue. I took the diagnostics as the issue was occurring. Please let me know if there's anything I can try.

Thanks!

[jeremy]

Hey Alban,

Do you have any update from this conversation? I have also sent an email to the technical inquiries with this information as well.

We now have access to the Creator's Update for the Enterprise version of Windows 10 and have been successful in our deployment with SCCM. I will be testing this with an alpha group of testers so I will update when that has finished.

Thanks!

[AlbanRampon]

Hello Jeremy,

There has been bank holidays doubled with personal holidays since your reply.
I see you've also created a ticket so it will handled there now and James will update you when the bug report is being handled if they need more info.

Kind regards,
Alban