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

Funny, I was doing something and got a blue screen shortly after posting that and my Surface did the first two updates during the restart. Used the pen and had the issue again. 

Error: 

Faulting application name: dwm.exe, version: 10.0.19041.746, time stamp: 0x6be51595

Faulting module name: HeatCore.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x54ab4a1a

Exception code: 0xc0000409

Fault offset: 0x0000000000035b5d

Faulting process id: 0x3f4c

Faulting application start time: 0x01d71aa575b73c6e

Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\dwm.exe

Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\HeatCore.dll

Report Id: 32c0853a-eb8c-418f-bf07-bf1189c89608

Faulting package full name: 

Faulting package-relative application ID:

Warning:

The Desktop Window Manager process has exited. (Process exit code: 0xc0000409, Restart count: 2, Primary display device ID: Intel(R) Iris(R) Plus Graphics)

I know these updates occurred a few days back as well:

Surface - Extension - 2.9.139.0

Intel Corporation - Extension - 27.20.100.8681

Will report back later today after doing the optional KB5001567 I mentioned above. 

Edit: Problem still persists after the optional KB5001567 I mentioned.

Still having this issue. Surface pen causes heatcore.dll and dwm.exe to crash. Everything is up to date and has always been. Been crashing for literally 4 months straight.

I should have just bought an ipad to do school work on.... jesus.

Okay, so even on the 26. Version driver I had a black screen crash this morning.

Seen some reports that this "might be due to onenote" so uninstalled the Office version of OneNote 2016.

Will see how that goes and maybe upgrade the drivers to latest again.

I've seen this issue persist even upon upgrading to OneNote "2019," so I don't think it's that either. I would guess it's the combination of the Intel driver and 20H2, since I want to say I didn't have this issue before the October update.

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.

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.