Games started closing without warning after the August 11 update. Sometimes an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION box, sometimes the app just vanishes, sometimes the whole machine restarts. The update is not the real culprit. Your RGB lighting software is.

Microsoft investigated the reports and traced it to drivers that ship with RGB lighting peripherals and internal components, with file names similar to inpoutx64.

Quick Fix

Install the latest cumulative update. Microsoft resolved this on August 27 with a block that stops the inpoutx64 driver from loading on affected devices. Once the block is applied you get a message saying the driver was blocked, and the games run again.

Get-HotFix | Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -First 5

Then update your lighting software. The block stops the old driver from loading, which fixes the crashes but also stops that software from controlling your lighting until the vendor ships a build that no longer relies on the blocked driver. Check the support page for whichever RGB suite you run and take the current version.

What Was Happening

Microsoft named the symptoms in the KB: the game becomes unresponsive, the game closes without notice, EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION appears, or the device restarts without warning. Games identified in the reports include ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, and THE FINALS.

The common thread on every affected machine was an RGB lighting driver in the inpoutx64 family. These drivers exist to poke hardware ports directly so lighting software can talk to controllers, which is exactly the kind of low-level access the August security update tightened. When a game loaded on a system where that driver was present, the conflict took the process down with it.

The tell is the hardware, not the game. A workstation with an RGB keyboard, RGB memory, or an RGB motherboard header can hit this. It is not a gaming-only problem, it is just that games were the workload that surfaced it first.

Microsoft: KB5121003 known issues and resolution

If That Didn’t Work

Confirm the driver is actually present. Search the driver store for the file name Microsoft named. If nothing comes back, your crash has a different cause.

Get-ChildItem C:\Windows\System32\drivers -Filter "inpout*" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Uninstall the lighting software outright. If the vendor has not shipped an updated build, removing the suite removes the driver with it. You lose lighting control and get a stable machine, which is the right trade on a work PC.

Check the GPU driver too. Crash-on-launch after a Windows update has more than one cause. If the machine has no RGB hardware at all, the graphics driver is the more likely suspect and our AMD crash writeup below covers that path.

Do not roll back the update. The August cumulative is a security update, and the resolution for this issue ships inside the same servicing train. Removing it reopens the patched vulnerabilities and does not get your lighting software working.

AMD GPU Crashes After a Windows Update

Dell Laptop Overheating After July Update: KB5121767

Fix KB5089573 Preview Update Install Errors

Workstations crashing after Patch Tuesday? Contact Rain City Techworks.