The crashing games trace back to your RGB lighting

Two weeks after the August update started knocking games over, Microsoft has put a cause on the record. It's the lights. Not the lights themselves, but the software that comes with them. Keyboards, mice, fans, coolers and memory sticks that glow all need a way to talk to the hardware, and some of them install a low-level driver to do it. When we last wrote about this, Microsoft was still deciding whether the fault was its own.

The release health entry, updated on 21 August, now says the problem "is related to peripherals or internal device components which have RGB lighting features. Such devices may install drivers or code components with file names similar to inpoutx64." Same three games named as before - ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls and THE FINALS - on Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, and the same four symptoms, including the PC restarting with no warning at all.

What's changed is that Microsoft has published its own workaround instead of leaving it to a game studio. Open regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\inpoutx64, set the value named Start to 4, and restart. That turns the driver off. Microsoft is honest about the trade: doing this "can result in unintended behavior, such as issues with RGB features on peripherals or components, or issues with the software used to control RGB features." Your lighting may go dark, or the app that controls it may stop responding. The entry is still marked Investigating, so a real fix comes later.

Back up the registry first. Microsoft says so twice in its own instructions, and it's worth the two minutes. If the unexplained reboots have already caught you with work open, that's the other thing to sort out today - Tendvane's one-click Backup copies Documents, Pictures and Desktop to a drive of your own, and it takes about as long as reading this did.