Two days ago, I was running Razorfen Kraul on my resto shaman alt, and suddenly Wow.exe stopped responding. It did the typical Windows 10 “no longer responding” thing, where the whole screen went grey and my cursor turned into the spinning blue circle. The screen was frozen during the spiraling ramp up to the final boss.
Since I was the healer, I had to get back in-game as fast as possible. First I attempted to hit the “x” at the top-right of the window; Windows 10 offered me the standard dialogue box asking if I wanted to “Wait” or “Stop” the process; I pressed “Stop”. For most programs that’ll do it, but this time it did nothing.
In a mad rush, I control+shift+escaped the task manager open, right clicked on WoW.exe and clicked “end task”… when I was presented with a most curious error message. “Permission denied: you do not have permission to terminate 'Wow.exe'”
Interesting, I thought. Well there’s no way I am opening up a task manager as administrator. I went to the Blizzard launcher to see if there was anything about killing all child processes, when I noticed that Blizzard didn’t think WoW was “currently running”. Even though the greyed-out Wow.exe window was still there, showing my Shaman in RFK, the Blizzard launcher was offering me the ability to open Wow yet again. I tried it, and sure enough, a second WoW window opened. I figured I would finish the dungeon in it, and then handle the frozen and un-terminable window afterward.
After the dungeon, I closed out of the proper WoW window and then tried, yet again, to “end task” the broken Wow.exe process; yet again I get “permission denied”. I must say, it is more than a little disturbing that WoW requires administrator permissions to terminate.
But I opened up powershell, got a process list, and carefully used ‘taskkill.exe \f \im Wow.exe’ in the context of SYSTEM, even though I am unfamiliar with how taskkill works or even if windows has different kill signals to choose from or anything like that. Taskkill.exe reported that the process had been killed, but it was still there, still nonresponsive, and still showed up in the task manager.
I decided that while my own Windows knowledge was lacking, surely Microsoft itself knew how to safely terminate a misbehaving process. I safely closed everything other than the Wow.exe process, and then attempted to do a reboot through the Power menu in the windows start menu. As expected, Windows told me that some programs weren’t closing, and listed Wow.exe, and asked if I wanted to reboot anyway, warning me I could lose unsaved work. I pressed the “reboot anyway” button. It took me to the “Rebooting…” screen with the spinning blue circle for a cursor. And then it stayed there.
For an hour.
I determined that whatever was going on, it was unexpected even to the Windows 10 developers, and my entire computer was literally softlocked by this Wow.exe process. I had no choice but to hold down the power button until the computer power cycled, praying that it would not brick my computer. Then I turned the power back on, and Windows 10 came up as normal. I breathed a sigh of relief; everything seemed to be working.
But when it came time to boot up WoW, I went to the Blizzard launcher, clicked “start”, WoW opened up in the standard windowed mode that I had set, and then a few seconds after “connecting to server” I got a horrible-looking error dialogue, pictured here: https://i.imgur.com/Wel5ZFL.jpg
I see some d3dx12 stuff in there… whatever “swapchain()” is, it sounds like deep-level stuff, and the filepath leads me to believe it’s buried deep inside the directx stuff. Not something for me to be messing with. But clearly the path lies within my WoW installation directory, so, no biggie. I just need to repair the WoW installation directory. I go to the blizzard launcher, go to World of Warcraft, go to Options, and hit Repair. And indeed, after it’s finished scanning my installation directory, it finds some corrupted files and reinstalls them. I figure I’m good to go… but when it finishes the repair patch and I open WoW, I still get the same error and crash.
Next up, I figure whatever happened might have something to do with directx; perhaps some actual graphics-driver-dx-interface-process thing related to WoW and also related to my nvidia drivers got interrupted. So I open up GeForce Experience, completely rip out all of my nvidia graphics drivers, and do a clean, fresh install. I try running WoW at both the point where my computer doesn’t even see my nVidia card and thinks my intel built-in is the only video card, and then again after I get fresh nvidia drivers; in both cases I get the same error message and crash-to-desktop.
Next up, clearly the problem is with files inside my WoW installation directory. Perhaps the repair utility simply doesn’t know about this specific problem, and so while repairing didn’t fix it, maybe a complete uninstall will. So I completely uninstall World of Warcraft using the Blizzard launcher -> WoW -> Options -> Uninstall. After it’s finished, I hit “Install” on the Blizzard launcher; I now have a fresh installation, I think. And indeed, when I hit “Open” after the download reaches the ‘playable’ stage, it’s clear that my old options got deleted at least, because it opens up in Full Screen mode. I pray that it will work, but it doesn’t. About a second after “connecting to server” I get the error message and crash to desktop.
Maybe when WoW is finished installing, it’ll work then? Nope. Downloaded all 60G and installed and I still CTD.
I am at a complete loss as to what to do next. Please help, I am wasting subscription days as we speak.
TL;DR:
- WoW freezes, unresponsive. “End Task” returns “permission denied”. “taskkill.exe \f \im Wow.exe” returns “1 process successfully terminated” but the process is still there in task manager.
- standard reboot attempt. Windows warns that Wow.exe isn’t shutting down, offers “reboot anyway” but warns I might lose unsaved data. I “reboot anyway”. Windows sits at the “rebooting…” screen for an hour; it is clear my machine is softlocked. I do a manual powercycle by holding the power button down and then turning the computer back on. Everything seems fine, but now when I try to boot WoW I get this error message:
https://i.imgur.com/Wel5ZFL.jpg - I try everything I can think of. I repair WoW’s installation directory. I uninstall and clean install my graphics drivers. I carefully parse error logs looking for hints. I uninstall and reinstall WoW. I reboot my computer many times. Nothing works, error message remains.
The error and regular logs from my most recent attempts to boot World of Warcraft are available here: http://john.soupwhale.com/wowerrors/Errors/ each is identical to each other and all are identical to the now-lost error logs from prior to my uninstalling WoW
The regular, non-error logs from my most recent attempts are available here: http://john.soupwhale.com/wowerrors/Logs/
Notable lines, from wowerrors/Logs/gx.log:
`7/25 22:16:52.420 Detected Graphics Defaults: 6 (CPU = 6, GPU = 6, MEM = 6)`
`7/25 22:16:52.591 RenderSettings::NotifyChanged`
`7/25 22:16:58.981 Nvidia driver version: r430_00 (43160)`
`7/25 22:17:00.743 RenderSettings::NotifyChanged`
`7/25 22:17:02.619 Exception caught in SwapChain::Present`
`7/25 22:17:02.843 Device context was lost. Attempting recovery. Occurrence: 1`
`7/25 22:17:03.231 GxRestart`
`7/25 22:17:03.305 D3d12 Device Destroy`
`7/25 22:17:03.425 NotifyOnDeviceDestroy`
`7/25 22:17:03.623 D3d12 Device Create`
`7/25 22:17:03.768 Choosing adapter 0`
`7/25 22:17:03.888 Detected NvAPI and checking if it's valid...`
`7/25 22:17:03.927 AFR Groups: 1/1`
`7/25 22:17:03.972 Feature Level: DX=6, MTL=0`
`7/25 22:17:04.050 NotifyOnDeviceCreate`
`7/25 22:17:04.490 D3d12 Device Create Successful`
`7/25 22:17:04.517 Nvidia driver version: r430_00 (43160)`
`7/25 22:17:04.561 <IsGPUDriverOutOfDate> No`
`7/25 22:17:04.792 Received DeviceRemoved:::`
`7/25 22:17:04.860 Exception caught in SwapChain::Present`
`7/25 22:17:04.888 Device context was lost. Attempting recovery. Occurrence: 2`
Notable lines, from wowerrors/Errors/2019-07-25%2022.17.06%20Error%20-%204052.txt
`This application has encountered a critical error:`
`ERROR #0 (0x85100000) Assertion failure!`
`Program: D:\GameBins\World of Warcraft\_retail_\Wow.exe`
`ProcessID: 4052`
`File: d:\buildserver\wow\2\work\shared-checkout\branches\wow-patch-8_2_0-branch-fastpatch-7\engine\source\gx\src\d3d12\gxdeviced3d12on10.cpp`
`Line: 428`
`Expr: SwapChain::Present threw an exception 2 times in a row`
`<Exception.IssueType> Exception`
`<ExceptionType> Assert`
`<Exception.Summary:>`
`ERROR #0 (0x85100000) Assertion failure!`
` ` `SwapChain::Present threw an exception 2 times in a row at d:\buildserver\wow\2\work\shared-checkout\branches\wow-patch-8_2_0-branch-fastpatch-7\engine\source\gx\src\d3d12\gxdeviced3d12on10.cpp(428)`
System specs:
Operating System
Windows 10 Home 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 @ 2.20GHz 54 °C
Coffee Lake 14nm Technology
RAM
16.0GB
Motherboard
Micro-Star International Co. Ltd. MS-16P5 (U3E1)
Graphics
Generic PnP Monitor (1920x1080@60Hz)
Intel UHD Graphics 630 (MSI)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (MSI) 51 °C
SLI Disabled
Storage
119GB KINGSTON RBUSNS8180S3128GJ (SATA-2 (SSD)) 48 °C
931GB Seagate ST1000LM049-2GH172 (SATA (SSD)) 41 °C
Optical Drives
No optical disk drives detected
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio
If there is anything else I should provide for diagnostics, let me know.