Windows 11 broke games and login. But uninstalling is not a good idea

The mandatory security update KB5121003 for Windows 11, released by Microsoft on August 11, fixes over 420 security flaws. However, some users have experienced worse performance after its deployment – they report game crashes, unexpected restarts, and login issues. Microsoft has not yet listed any known problems in the official release notes.

The update itself is not the culprit

Players of Arc Raiders and The Finals from Embark Studio are complaining the loudest. The studio confirmed the problem on Discord and traced its origin: a conflict with the inpoutx64.sys driver, which is a third-party component running at the system kernel level. The update apparently changed something that this long-standing driver cannot handle. It’s interesting where it comes from on computers – many affected players found that a Razer update tool installed it. Users of the game Marvel Tōkon also report similar crashes.

A PIN that constantly needs to be re-entered

Game crashes are not the only problem, however. Windows Latest reported isolated cases where Windows Hello fails after the update – in one instance, the PIN has to be set up again after each restart because the login key gets corrupted every time. There are also scattered reports of spontaneous refresh rate drops, black screens, and broken HDR.

Uninstall, or wait?

If your games are crashing, the most sensible solution is to remove the problematic driver or the software that installed it into the system – Embark has published a guide for this. Uninstalling the entire update should be the last resort, as it also patches an actively exploited vulnerability. Therefore, if the computer is not completely unusable, it is better to wait until the September package.

Have you also encountered problems after the August Windows update?

Source: Notebookcheck, Windows Latest