Here’s a mystery for Windows-lovers (or haters) – unexplained crashes in the Intel integrated graphics driver whenever the computer is left unattended. A few weeks ago I upgraded to a new PC, choosing an HP Elitebook x360 laptop that’s mainly used in a desk-bound docked mode. This computer is running Windows 10 Pro with whatever drivers HP saw fit to preinstall. The mystery began shortly after the new computer was put into service. When I’d sit down at the computer in the morning, I’d find a log-on screen and a blank desktop. All the programs and documents that I’d left open from my previous session were gone. Why?
Hunting the Cause
My first thought was to suspect Windows Update. Probably it was downloading and installing updates overnight, rebooting the computer afterwards. That would be annoying, but at least it would be explained, and wouldn’t happen too often. But the problem reappeared every day or two over the next week, sometimes even happening twice in the same day. I never witnessed the update reboot happening (or whatever it was), but when I’d leave the computer unattended for a couple of hours or overnight, I’d often find an empty desktop when I returned.
Eventually I thought to check the Windows event viewer (Control Panels -> System and Security -> Administrative Tools -> View Event Logs). Here I found symptoms of a very different problem than I’d imagined. The computer was frequently crashing and rebooting whenever I was away:
The same sequence of errors appeared five times over the last week, at seemingly random times of day: 9:25 AM, 5:25 PM, 1:26 AM, 8:21 AM, 12:57 PM. This doesn’t obviously fit with my usage of the computer. Some of the crashes happened an hour or two after I last used the computer, other crashes were 12+ hours after. The times also don’t seem to fit with any background task that I can identify.
I installed the program BlueScreenView to examine the crash dump files referenced in the BugCheck entries of the event log. Each crash dump appears to overwrite the previous one, so I was only able to example the most recent crash. To further complicate things, Windows appears to periodically delete the crash dump files according to some schedule I haven’t determined. But I was able to catch and examine several crash dumps over a few days, and all of them showed the same culprit. It was an error 0x0000007e (SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED) in igdkmd64.sys. A quick Google search revealed that igdkmd64.sys is the Intel integrated graphics driver for recent CPUs with built-in graphics hardware.
No Driver Update for You
My first thought was to update the graphics driver. Maybe the crash was caused by some bug that’s fixed in the current version. I visited the Device Manager and tried to update the driver there, but was told my driver version 25.20.100.6472 from December 2018 was already up to date.
Skeptical, I visited HP’s support site and confirmed that the latest driver version there is the same 25.20.100.6472. Then I visited Intel’s site to search for the driver, and discovered that the current version is 26.20.100.6890 and was released just two weeks ago on May 29. Aha! I downloaded the driver and attempted to install it, only to be denied:
It seems I had a special HP-customized version of the Intel graphics driver already installed, and the generic driver installer refused to replace it. Some more web searching suggested that it was almost always safe to ignore this and install the generic driver anyway, using the Device Manager to directly select the driver’s INF file rather than using the driver installer. But I was denied there too. Intel recently switched to some new type of driver installation that’s not backwards compatible with previous drivers, and they explicitly warn that bypassing the installer by manually choosing the INF will result in “minor to catastrophic” issues on your computer. Here’s the full text:
Important Note:
These new drivers labeled as Windows DCH graphics drivers are not backward compatible with our previous graphics drivers that we’re now labeling Legacy. This means if later you want to revert to a Legacy driver you will need to uninstall the driver via Windows Apps and Features and reboot the system before installing a Legacy driver. Failure to do so may result in minor to catastrophic issues on your system as well as system instability.
DO NOT use the INF / Have-Disk method to install or uninstall this driver as it bypasses the Intel installer designed to install these new drivers, thereby possibly resulting in minor to major system instability. For this reason, we’re not providing the ZIP file for the next several driver releases while users transition to this new Microsoft driver platform.
There’s probably a way to circumvent this and install the driver anyway, but since I have no specific reason to believe it will fix my problem, and Intel has warned me not to do it, I’m going to leave it as is.
Idle Speculation
That leaves me with unexplained system crashes without any obvious solution. But given the type and timing of the crashes, I can speculate about the possible cause.
The crashes always occurs when the computer is unattended, never (so far) while I’ve been using it. That suggests a problem related to sleep/wake, or else with some background process that only runs when the computer is idle. But the computer isn’t sleeping, or at least it shouldn’t be. The sleep timeout is set to 18 hours, and that seems to be working correctly. I don’t think the computer is sleeping or waking when these crashes occur.
The rather strange number of 18 hours was chosen to accommodate my backup software, Paragon Hard Disk Manager 16. It’s configured to do an incremental backup to an external USB drive every night at 12:30 AM. It’s also configured to wake the computer from sleep, if necessary, to do the backup. But I found that wake from sleep didn’t work, and if the computer was asleep at 12:30 AM, the backup wouldn’t happen. By extending the sleep timeout to 18 hours, it ensures that I’ll get a backup at 12:30 AM if I used the computer any time after 6:30 AM the previous day. That’s about right for my usage. These mystery crashes started at roughly the same time as when I installed the Paragon backup software, so maybe that’s a clue, or maybe it’s just coincidence.
The second detail of these crashes is that they’re in the graphics driver, so presumably they’re somehow graphics-related. This is a laptop computer used as a desktop, so the laptop normally has its lid closed and its built-in screen disabled, while I work with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. This isn’t exactly a rare setup, but it’s not the most common configuration either, and maybe it’s somehow contributing to the problem. I could try leaving the computer with the lid open for a while to see if that helps, but it’s not really how I wish to use the hardware.
There’s one more clue to consider. Also in the event log, I found many entries related to a problem with gfxdownloadwrapper.exe. I couldn’t find much information about this program on the web, but it appears related to Intel graphics drivers somehow. These errors first appeared on May 29 and the last one was on June 8, but the mysterious igdkmd64.sys crash has happened three more times since then.
The gfxdownloadwrapper problem is related, perhaps, but not a direct cause. For now this will remain a mystery, and an advertisement for why people dislike Windows.