Microsoft Blocks a Rogue RGB Driver That Was Crashing Windows 11 Gaming PCs

Key points

• Microsoft began rolling out a permanent fix on August 26, 2026 for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 crashes tied to a driver called inpoutx64.sys.
• The crashes hit players of ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls and The Finals with an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error.
• The driver ships with some peripherals and internal components that have RGB lighting, the colourful glowing lights popular on gaming keyboards and mice.
• Consumer and unmanaged business PCs get the block automatically after a restart, within 24 hours of the rollout.
• IT-managed enterprise machines need admins to disable the driver by hand through a registry edit.

Microsoft has quietly killed a driver that was making Windows 11 gaming PCs fall over. The culprit is a small piece of software called inpoutx64.sys, which ships with a lot of gaming peripherals that have RGB lighting, the colourful glowing effects on keyboards, mice, fans and cases.

In practice, the driver was doing something Windows no longer tolerates when certain games loaded, and the whole machine would crash with an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error. That is Windows-speak for a program trying to touch memory it is not allowed to touch.

The issue was first reported by BleepingComputer after players of ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls and The Finals started flooding forums with complaints. Games would freeze on launch, or the whole PC would fall over.

What is actually broken?

A driver called inpoutx64.sys, bundled with RGB lighting software from various peripheral makers, is triggering crashes when certain games start up on Windows 11 version 24H2 and 25H2. The driver gives applications low-level access to hardware, and modern Windows security controls do not like that.

Microsoft originally suspected its own August 2026 updates were to blame. After digging in, the company pointed the finger at third-party RGB software instead. "Ongoing investigation indicates that this issue is related to peripherals or internal device components which have RGB lighting features," Microsoft wrote in its Windows release health notice. "Such devices may install drivers or code components with file names similar to inpoutx64."

The failure mode here is familiar: a niche driver written years ago for looser versions of Windows collides with newer memory protections, and the game process is what tips it over the edge.

How is Microsoft fixing it?

Rather than wait for every RGB vendor to ship an update, Microsoft is blocking the driver from loading at all. On affected PCs, Windows now refuses to start inpoutx64.sys and pops up a message explaining what happened. The game then launches normally.

The block began rolling out at 6 PM Pacific on August 26, 2026, and can take up to 24 hours to reach every eligible device. A restart is required. It will also be baked into the September 2026 Windows security updates and every release after that.

What about work laptops?

If your PC is managed by an IT department, the automatic block will not reach you. Microsoft has published a manual workaround for admins: open the Windows Registry, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\inpoutx64, set the Start value to 4, and reboot. Back up the registry first. Setting Start to 4 tells Windows never to load the driver.

This is a good moment for platform teams to check what else on their fleet is shipping kernel drivers alongside consumer software. RGB utilities, overclocking tools and even some laptop vendor apps quietly install code that runs with the highest privileges on the machine. When one of them breaks, users blame Windows.

One thing the post-mortem will say: nobody at the RGB software vendor is going to lose sleep over this. Microsoft ate the support cost.

Operational takeaway: audit your endpoints for third-party kernel drivers before Windows Update decides to audit them for you.