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

Key points

• Microsoft began rolling out a fix on August 26, 2026 for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 crashes tied to a driver called inpoutx64.sys.
• Crashes hit players of ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls and The Finals with an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error.
• The driver ships with 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 manually 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 gaming peripherals that have RGB lighting, the colourful glowing effects on keyboards, mice and cases.

When certain games loaded, the driver was doing something Windows no longer tolerates, and the whole machine would crash with an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error. That's Windows-speak for a program trying to touch memory it isn't 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. We were tracking this a week earlier: on 20 August we reported that Microsoft was already probing the KB5121003 patch after gamers reported freezes and sudden reboots.

What is actually broken?

The driver gives applications low-level access to hardware, and modern Windows security controls don't 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. Games then launch normally.

The block began rolling out at 6 PM Pacific on August 26, 2026. It can take up to 24 hours to reach every eligible device, and a restart is required. It'll 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 won't reach you. Microsoft has published a manual workaround for admins: open the Windows Registry, navigate 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 and overclocking tools quietly install code that runs with the highest privileges on the machine. When one of them breaks, users blame Windows.

Nobody at the RGB software vendor is losing sleep over this. Microsoft ate the support cost.

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