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Prerequisite system info: OS: Win 10 Pro x64, build 18363; CPU: Intel i5-4590; GPU: GTX 970; RAM: dual-channel 8GB DDR3 HyperX Fury; Mobo: AsRock H97 Anniversary
Issue: This is something that has arisen on a few occasions this year. It was a clean install of Windows on a machine that was built this past August. For whatever reason, and I've noticed this tends to happen when I'd try to play some very older games (2005 and prior), the game might, for example, crash immediately on launch (no message, just a blue loading swirl forever until you either click it and get the 'program not responding' message or force-close it with Task Manager), and then this happens: Windows, or something in it, seems to break, because from this point onward, you can't successfully launch the majority of apps. If you try to launch something simple even like CPU-Z, it just doesn't launch. Try to launch any game from a myriad of different APIs, they don't launch. The only way to 'fix' the issue is to reboot Windows.
I wondered if it was a driver issue, but in Windows 10 you can use a hotkey combination to quickly restart the drivers, and this doesn't fix the problem. I had this issue trigger when I tried to launch an old Star Wars game that was made in the late 90s about 2 months ago, and today I got it again when I tried to launch Need For Speed: Underground 2. I did also try a myriad of compatibility mode options and running it as admin, none had any effect on solving this issue or preventing it.
My question is, is anyone familiar with this phenomenon and/or how to fix it without a reboot? My GPU drivers are up-to-date, as are the various (and numerous) Microsoft DirectX runtimes, VC redistributables, .Net packages, etc. This is an uncommon issue, but it's something I'd like to learn about -- what's the actual cause of this, why it happens, and how to rectify it. It's a bit underwhleming because I've never had this issue with Win8 or Win7, it's only ever happened on Win10 so far. I wonder if it's a similar thing to how certain Windows 10 updates have historically broken compatibility with older software, like how there was one specific update that broke compatibility with DX10 games.
Issue: This is something that has arisen on a few occasions this year. It was a clean install of Windows on a machine that was built this past August. For whatever reason, and I've noticed this tends to happen when I'd try to play some very older games (2005 and prior), the game might, for example, crash immediately on launch (no message, just a blue loading swirl forever until you either click it and get the 'program not responding' message or force-close it with Task Manager), and then this happens: Windows, or something in it, seems to break, because from this point onward, you can't successfully launch the majority of apps. If you try to launch something simple even like CPU-Z, it just doesn't launch. Try to launch any game from a myriad of different APIs, they don't launch. The only way to 'fix' the issue is to reboot Windows.
I wondered if it was a driver issue, but in Windows 10 you can use a hotkey combination to quickly restart the drivers, and this doesn't fix the problem. I had this issue trigger when I tried to launch an old Star Wars game that was made in the late 90s about 2 months ago, and today I got it again when I tried to launch Need For Speed: Underground 2. I did also try a myriad of compatibility mode options and running it as admin, none had any effect on solving this issue or preventing it.
My question is, is anyone familiar with this phenomenon and/or how to fix it without a reboot? My GPU drivers are up-to-date, as are the various (and numerous) Microsoft DirectX runtimes, VC redistributables, .Net packages, etc. This is an uncommon issue, but it's something I'd like to learn about -- what's the actual cause of this, why it happens, and how to rectify it. It's a bit underwhleming because I've never had this issue with Win8 or Win7, it's only ever happened on Win10 so far. I wonder if it's a similar thing to how certain Windows 10 updates have historically broken compatibility with older software, like how there was one specific update that broke compatibility with DX10 games.
