When I press the right trigger on my game controller, my system's audio crashes. Probably the weirdest bug I've seen yet -- anyone feel like helping?
due to the looming pandemic forcing everyone to stay inside, I've recently decided to get back into video games. I did a fresh install of windows 10 the other day, and tried to play a few games with my controller. I found that whenever I press the right trigger on my controller, my computer's audio cuts out system-wide immediately and does not come back on until I restart.
The controller is a wired Afterglow for Xbox 360 PL-3702.
Windows 10, version 1903.
I see two audio devices under Sound, Video and Game Controllers in Device Manager: a AMD High Definition Audio Device and a Realtek Audio device.
I've tried updating drivers for my controller and audio controllers.
I've reproduced the issue and collected logs of it following the steps here. If you know how to read these I'd be happy to send you the trace.
Now, I've tried to look at the trace of this in both Windows Performance Analyzer and Windows Media eXperience Analyzer to try and get a better sense of what's causing this. I see a pretty clear event where a bunch of stuff shows up in the visualizer, but I don't know what any of the stack traces that show up mean. This did not occur on my previous install of Windows on the same computer so I suspect it's related to something with some new Windows "gaming" feature I didn't have before.
I'm really at a loss as to where to go from here. It's both perfectly clear and completely mystifying. Any ideas?
Does your controller have a headphone jack? Plug some headphones in and see if the computer's audio is switching to that.
Whether it does or doesn't, see if the controller has popped up as a new Sound device in that menu.
This is incredibly amusing to me. I have no idea what could be causing this, but I'd be happy to look through your logs. You can email them to my username at gmail.
Do you have any other gamepads you can test this with, see if the same thing happens? Also, when you say you reinstalled drivers for it, was that some software that came with the controller or came from the manufacturer, or did you install the drivers from microsoft?
I know one "gaming-related" thing that's new (and annoying) in Windows 10 is the "Game Bar" -- that causes weird stuff to happen for me and my partner during games. Mostly visual though, never had an issue with audio. But I know it's related to some kind of "streaming overlay" they built into Windows 10, so maybe it's detecting your controller and trying to prompt for that?
Best of luck, I know some of this stuff can be very arcane to pick through. If the stack trace shows any kind of .dll files that are being called before the crash or errors about them being missing, that could be a huge hint too. (CTRL+F ".dll" ?)
Did you manually install drivers for the controller and sound devices, or have windows do it automatically? Windows is really good about getting it's own drivers, and they are often more stable than the manufacturers ones. Try uninstalling sound card and controller drivers, rebooting, plugging everything in, and waiting. It shouldn't take too long.