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

Interestingly enough, it appears that it does happen sometimes even when not using the pen. I didn't notice it, I don't know whether the screen just didn't go black or the lid was closed, but it still shows up in Reliability Monitor with the same HeatCore.dll issue. 
The reason why I noticed is that there is another effect of dwm.exe crashing: Microsoft Teams (and sometimes some other Electron-based apps ... maybe) go black (but only sometimes), so I have to restart it completely in order to use it.

Anyway, according to MS support, their technical department should get back to me in the next couple of days, MAYBE they come up with a fix. Hopefully.

Don't do that, that is absolutely useless! I wanted several hours on a clean install using the recovery image and issue persisted. 0/10 not worth the effort.

Ask your brother to take a closer look instead, that advice was so generic it could have come from Microsoft support.

Anyway, good luck fixing it

This might work folks. I am trying the Regedit fix for the next week.

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Hey can you try this workaround after updating firmware from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=100419

Try this workaround:

• Boot into safe mode
• as administrator, take ownership of this file (google for the process on how to take ownership of system files in Windows 10) c:\windows\system32\heatcore.dll
• rename heatcore.dll to heatcore.dll.bak
• reboot

I think if you do this, the pen will still work but without the tilt feature.

Also, can you report the content of this regkey? Heatcore.dll refers to it:

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Heat

If a device is listed here, changing the devicename to some random letters may workaround the issue.

I think either approach will prevent the "HEAT" API from working which I believe is some internal Microsoft real-time pen input processing deal to detect which way you're gripping the pen, compute pen vs tablet angle, compute parallax compensation, and stuff like that.

SOURCE

https://dancharblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/29/surface-pro-7-7-black-screen-dwm-exe-crashes-when-using-pen-i-have-a-workaround/

I've even tried to find one of the previous Surface recovery images but when I put my serial number into  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface-recovery-image it shows a 20H1 and a 1903 recovery image but both links are identical and appear to be the 20H1 image. Apparently going back is not an option unless I can find a generic Windows image and apply the Surface Driver pack.

I'm not sure if this is 100% effective, but it appears having my surface connected to power when I touch my screen for the first time with my pen prevents the DWM/heatcore.dll crash. Hoping it works for others! I'll update in a week.