Sudden issues across multiple VMs - flickerin black screens, freezing, booting out, crashes

[tomscase]

Hi all,

All of a sudden, many of my VMs, which are different OSs (Win 10, 11, 2012 R2, 2012, CentOS) started to play up. I'm on a Win10 Enterprise 21H2. Running Workstation 16 Pro 16.2.4 build-20089737

Issues included intermittent freezing, flickering screen (black), loss of mouse, windows (in the VM closing) being kicked out (logged off) and in more recent episode in a Win 11 VM it logged me off and then back in it presented an error saying I was logged off because of DWM crashed (see below).

After lots of troubleshooting (and even shifting to a new laptop and today seeing the same issues) it's either pointing to a problem with VMware workstation (same version across two laptops) or recent Windows Updates.

I see other in this forum thinking it may be related to the Service Stack 10.0.19041.1940 or Security Update (KB5017308) which seem to have come down at the same time.

Anyone else seeing similar issues?

[jbuck1]

Yes.  All of a sudden some of my Guest Machines are just freezing and becoming unresponsive.  nothing on the logs is helpful

[gahanzwart]

Same here

[Virtualmee]

Yes, as of KB5016688 it started.  

Are you seeing the following error in your VM client eventvwr?

Fault bucket 1271802286154808107, type 4
Event Name: APPCRASH
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: dwm.exe
P2: 10.0.19041.746
P3: 6be51595
P4: KERNELBASE.dll
P5: 10.0.19041.1949
P6: cb12e58e
P7: 8898009b
P8: 000000000010fb62
P9:
P10:

Pretty much made my VM useless.

[tomscase]

I was hoping the 'updated' Windows updates would fix the issue but no..... Still seeing the same 😞

Why is does it feel that no one at VMware is taking this seriously?

[RDPetruska]

I'm sure they are, but they are quite likely focused on the Workstation Tech Preview version.  Have you tried that to see if your issues go away?  And if not, send feedback in the beta forum about it!

[Virtualmee]

Can you explain why we'd try to test this on Tech Preview when it just started happening on Workstation Pro and I didn't change anything vs. prove that if I removed the preview update from Microsoft on my Host PC, that the issue would stop.  Tech Preview is back from 2020 right (or I'm just not tracking your thought there)?

[RDPetruska]

---

@Virtualmee wrote:

Can you explain why we'd try to test this on Tech Preview when it just started happening on Workstation Pro and I didn't change anything vs. prove that if I removed the preview update from Microsoft on my Host PC, that the issue would stop.  Tech Preview is back from 2020 right (or I'm just not tracking your thought there)?

---

Brand new Tech Preview 2022H2 - focused on better Win11 support and other things

[Virtualmee]

Oh sorry, I only saw the 2020 Preview.  If there's a way to download/test against 2022H2 and that would help VMWare address this, I'll try it.

I also ran Feedback Hub and uploaded everything to Microsoft, but my gut is they're going to punt this issue to VMWare since it doesn't happen in native Windows.

[Virtualmee]

@RDPetruska , can you add link to that Beta forum, I can't find it.

Thanks for the help.

[RDPetruska]

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Workstation-Tech-Preview/ct-p/WS-TP

[Virtualmee]

@RDPetruska 

I took this issue over to the other forum about it.

Re: Black screens (two or more loop times) while s... - Page 3 - VMware Technology Network VMTN

Seems like it's impacting a lot of people since September, we're all just seeing different front-end symptoms (blue screen, black screen, high CPU, etc...)  But it roots back to wdm.exe crashing.

[lakyk]

I have experienced same with workstation 15, 16.2 and 17. Temporary fix that always work until next windows update is to reinstall (repair) vmware workstation. This points on that some dll used by vmware is re-registered during windows update process.