Chromium based browsers randomly freezing after clicking dropdown menus (Streamdeck/zoom plugin appears to be culprit)

 Just another post to help the random person searching or an issue.

I was having random hard lockups and Chromium based browsers, (Edge, Chrome, and Brave were tested... although funnily enough Edge Beta never did it). I got to the point where I had no extensions running, incognito mode and it still happened, and if you had multiple chrome profiles open, which run as their own process it would freeze all of them. Needless to say this was quite annoying during the workday. Firefox luckily did not have the issue, where most of my browsing is done anyway.... Once I eliminated it wasn't any profiles or extension issue, I had to turn elsewhere, which I started just close a piece of software on the computer, test, and repeat. Closing Zoom seemed to fix it, but then it didn't. This was odd because it was so consistently freezing my dropdown menus in ServiceNow (the main place I was able to replicate the issue)...

So I take a gander at the event viewer and see the SDZoom plugin crashing every 10 or so minutes. (I'm not the only one https://github.com/smitmartijn/streamdeck-zoom-plugin/issues/26 )

Honestly I just got the streamdeck not too long ago and got plugin happy trying all sorts of things, and all those plugin commands sat about 2 folders deep and never quite worked the way I expected them to, seemed to always try and alt tab, it wasn't like global commands, which could've been really nice. So I removed the plugin, and low and behold no more issues with my chrome drop down menus.

Now the correlation that caused this, has got to be something with UI automation of some sort trying to read the screen data, and my monitor setup might also be a little extreme complicating matters, I'm not sure.

Elgato 4K60 Pro Glitchy Vertical bar, Vertical green bar in OBS, fix and another addition to my startup script

 Look trying to describe this type of artifacting can be difficult at times and my google-fu was not working when finding a solution to this issue. I've compiled a gallery of some images to attempt to help https://imgur.com/a/wBDrEB1 ... 

 

It was to the point where I opened an RMA request to Elgato and began working with their support team. I was troubleshooting this issue as much as possible to no avail. I didn't even figure out a way to consistently replicate it. It survived full Windows reinstalls! Then support got to the point where they had me use a tool that basically saves a bunch of data into a SupportInfo.zip ... Now this is pretty neat, grabs some log files, some standard windows DxDiags, bunch of other likely just combined scripts. I eventually figured out I was able to get it to work occasionally after a fresh restart, just not a "cold" shut down.

Then it dawned on me, didn't work after a cold boot. And I had done some Windows reloading recently not just for this issue, but another as well. Some may already know where this is going.Windows 10 doesn't truly shut down by default, it's a setting you have to "disable" https://lifehacker.com/shutting-down-windows-10-doesnt-actually-shut-down-wind-1825532376 . Interestingly Elgato recommends this if you're having installation issues https://help.elgato.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028243331-Elgato-Game-Capture-4K60-Pro-Installation-Issues ... mine installed fine so I never looked at it.

Doing this many windows reloads closer together have also inspired me to write a powershell script for freshly installed windows with many of my settings, and some software. And since I spin up VMs for random testing and help others out, it's really nice to have. I probably should put this in a github or something, but for now here's a zip with my script and some of the scripts that inspired me. SampleWindowsScripts.zip

If you want a simple powershell script to fix this

echo "Disable fast startup (Checkbox under define power buttons -- shutdown settings"
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power" /V HiberbootEnabled /T REG_DWORD /D 0x0 /F