Repeated Daily Crashes of Desktop Window Manager in Reliability Monitor When Using Pen

I am having the same problem!

I am having the same problem!

Hi, please copy and paste the error log from Reliability Monitor on here. Thanks!

The only fix I can suggest is downgrading to older graphics drivers. The latest drivers 27.20.100.9168 also has the black screen problem. Windows Update helpfully gave me Intel drivers which were upgraded to this problem a week or two ago.

The version from the last Surface Driver pack is 26.20.100.7641, dated December 2019 and I've not seen the black screen since installing them. If you want those drivers you can apparently download them from Microsoft here.

Since rolling back the driver I haven't been able to provoke a black screen.

This is likely to be more of a problem now as the February 2021 updates contain an update to Intel Corporation – Display - 27.20.100.8681 which apparently also contains whatever this bug is.

The build number suggests somewhere in the third quarter of last year as being the driver date, and Intel themselves released that driver on the 15th September. Microsoft presumably "validated" it by checking that it had a valid signature and that it didn't crash while installing and left it at that. Good job QA Team, oh wait you got dissolved...

So that at least narrows down this bug appearing between December 2019 and September 2020.

It is entirely possible that it is not the Intel drivers that are at fault, and it is instead some way that the Microsoft drivers for the touchscreen and pen are interacting with it causing it to crash out and restart the driver.

Or Intel could just be releasing gloriously broken drivers. I do see a lot of **igccservice "**PowerEvent handled successfully by the service." messages in Event Viewer, like one message every 3-5 seconds for days... hard to know if some Microsoft power driver is constantly spewing events, or if the driver simply isn't actually handling them properly.

The fact of the matter for me is that rolling back the driver seems to help. One way or another both of these companies need to slow down and actually look at the steaming piles that they are releasing into the wild.

Maybe this has something to do with the change from version 26.x to 27.x in May 2020. I will now try the first driver with the version number 27 and see if that works.