Hi All -
First off I hope everyone had a great New Years!
So I was playing WoW just fine this past weekend and up until Tuesday night when I went to bed. I woke up on Wednesday ready to game and noticed that my game now randomly fails with an Access Violation error:
The instruction at "0x00007ff663591ed0" referenced memory at "0x0000000000000011".
The memory could not be "read".
At first, I thought that perhaps the issue was hardware related so I ran a memory check that reported there were no problems, I ran a system disk check and it also reported there were no problems.
The next step I tried was to repair my WoW installation. This had no effect. I also re-installed WoW on a separate SSD which again had no effect. I’ve also tried using DX11 and DX12 and both API exhibit the exception.
The error is random. I have had it happen before the login bar reaches 100%, I’ve had it after playing for 5 minutes or even 30 minutes of play. The only thing that seems to be consistent with the error is that the memory address reference in the error is always a very low hex-value; although I’m not sure how relevant that is.
I’ve double checked CPU and GPU temperatures and they’re always in the normal range of operation, 39C to 42C (CPU) and 27C to 38C (GPU); so I don’t believe this is a problem with overheating.
In fact, using the computer to do any other activity besides gaming works just fine; it’s only a problem specific to when I run World of Warcraft.
So it occurred to me that perhaps there may have been a Windows Update that did not require a restart that could have been applied that could be creating problems. I looked at the Windows Update history and sure enough there were several random updates that were applied on Wednesday just before I began gaming:
Intel - SoftwareComponent - 1.41.2021.121
Successfully installed on 1/6/2022
Intel - SoftwareComponent - 1.63.1155.1
Successfully installed on 1/5/2022
A-Volute - SoftwareComponent - 3.5.1.0 ← likely problem
Successfully installed on 1/5/2022
Nahimic - MEDIA - 1.0.2.0 ← likely problem
Successfully installed on 1/5/2022
There haven’t been any other updates made to the system since 12/16 when I installed the last cumulative update that Windows downloaded.
This information is important because I began to look around to see if others had any type of similar problems and I found a Reddit article where someone has the same problem after these updates were applied with another non-Blizzard game.
Unfortunately I don’t see a way to uninstall or remove these components so I’ve opened this post to find out whether there is any known or unintended incompatibilities with these updates and World of Warcraft.