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Thanks Alex5723. I just searched my apps list, and the only 2 programs I have with the word “update” in the description are “Apple Software Update” and “Microsoft Edge Update”.

 

OK PKCano … well, there’s nothing else that looks even remotely suspicious.

Nice thought Microfix :-). I just tried that and it popped up a dialog box asking first if I was sure I wanted to uninstall (I clicked “yes”) and then another one stating uninstall had failed, as only apps that are installed can be uninstalled. I’m guessing it’s not there.

Sorry PKCano – not sure what you mean. App Installer?

Hm – nothing that implies a helper. Closest I’ve got to that is a Microsoft app called “App Installer”.

In the event log I have several installer messages from “Windows update service”. One relates to a game update, and the others are all phone updates (I use the Xbox Gaming service, but I don’t use the phone service).

 

Thanks PKCano – just checked, no luck. No apps listed beginning with KB or containing those digits.

Best,

Marc

Thanks for those replies folks and sorry for the delay in responding, but I didn’t receive an email notification they were there.

 

Microfix asked :

“So what prompted the action to access safemode in the first place?”

• All was well. The PC was freshly built. Windows 2004 was freshly installed. All patching was up to date. The software suite I rely on for production workflow was in place. But for one matter : I was seeing a small delay between launching a particular program via a DDE link, and returning control back to the UI so additional windows on the desktop could be interacted with. That short delay felt like a 3rd party software issue with something getting in the way of the dde channel, as it didn’t happen on my older PC (which also used Win2004). So … as I’ve done many times before, good practice involved a clean boot into safe mode to see if the problem happened there, and then I’d figure out which program was causing the delay.

MSCONFIG was launched, safe mode (no networking) was chosen and … bang. Windows Hello Pin where art thou.

“What patches were recently installed prior to the safemode/Hello PIN bootloop?”

• I couldn’t say specifically, except that Win2004 was fully updated at that time as part of the general Microsoft install process, and me hitting the “check for updates” until no more showed up.

Anonymous stated:

“A Windows Hello PIN is never checked externally:”

Fair enough – that blows my theory out of the water. Still, what happened was Windows Hello Pin didn’t even offer a dialog box where the pin could be typed in – it was just a message stating “something” went wrong, and I should click here to “setup new pin”. Clicking that link once did nothing. Clicking again brought up a dialog stating “this operation requires downloading a Windows application from the Microsoft Store. Do you want to do this?” And I answered “yes”. After that, nothing happened.

Anonymous also stated :

“A PIN in safe mode is valid after version 2004”

Thanks Anonymous. No it ain’t. Or, more specifically in my case, no it weren’t.

It is of course entirely possible I’m just unlucky and during the setup of the o/s originally, something didn’t get installed properly, but Windows Hello PIN was working fine up to that point for at least 2 days. Had I booted into my o/s with a normal boot, I’m sure it would still be waving hello to me even today, but regrettably, the safe-mode boot via msconfig totally knackered it.

(And they want me to use Bitlocker! Ha!).

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Microfix

This happened to me on 2 PCs, worked flawlessly on a third. Eventually figured out it was a lack of disk space on the o/s drive. I freed up around 60GB and tried again – worked like a charm.

One additional note which may be important : In my case, I use Dolby Atmos in a 5.1.4 configuration. That is to say, 5 main speakers, 1 subwoofer, and 4 height speakers.

Hence why channel phantoming, to redirect the missing back surrounds, is necessary. If someone else is still experiencing issues with a full stack and without the need for phantoming at all, then this would indicate an even more mainstream audio glitch with the 1909 code.

OK, in case this helps anyone else in similar circumstances, I’ve been able to remove the bottleneck (at least, so far observed and for the last 70 minutes all has been well, which is far longer than I’ve seen things working previously).

I’ll explain how, as your cause may be different to mine, but having identified that bitsperf.dll was faulting, I determined that a full rebuild of the WMI repository was required, and found this set of instructions: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-repair-or-rebuild-the-wmi-repository-on-windows-10

Part of this process involved what to do if the reset failed, and the advice was to stop all dependent services using the command: net stop winmgmt /y

In my case, this command also failed, but the failure code reported which services were in a state where they couldn’t be stopped. The first was IP Service, and the second – interestingly – was my anti malware software, Malwarebytes Premium.

I uninstalled Malwarebytes, rebooted, and then went through the WMI rebuild process as described in the page above.

Once that was done with, I rebooted again, waited 30 minutes to confirm the fault was no longer present, and then I re-installed Malwarebytes.

That was over an hour ago, and so far, so good. I suspect whatever needed repairing as an aspect of the various suggestions I’ve received was being blocked (silently) by Malwarebytes at a very low level.

I should have looked at my antivirus and anti malware earlier of course, but with everything else apparently behaving correctly, I had a blind spot in that direction.

I hope this helps others, and thanks again to PKCano for the assistance in pointing me in the right direction.

Best,

Marc

Hi – I have a little extra information on this : I followed the instructions at https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/196/Q196712/ which describe how to manually disable each DLL loaded up into perfmon.

The idea is to see if perfmon still works ok without them, and then progressively re-enable to determine which dll is causing the problem.

I have identified that a dll called “Bitsperf.dll” is the faulting item.

My version of bitsperf.dll has the following characteristics:

Date: 12/04/2018 00:34

Size: 29,696 bytes

Size on disk: 32,768 bytes

Product version : 7.8.17134.1

Further ideas on this?

Best,

Marc

Thanks PKCano (and Alex5723; thanks also, I appreciate the note on that but I’ve been using these particular system monitors in 8GadgetPack for several years with no problems, and their usefulness exceeds the risk factor. However, your warning is very sensible, and I do take precautions not to install unknown or suspicious gadgets, and keep my antivirus and antimalware software fully up to date with real time monitoring).

PKCano, I’ve followed your suggestion with dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth. This process completed successfully. I rebooted and monitored the system for 18 minutes, at which point the same problem occurred.

In perfmon, I see a chart for processor time (the default counter, which is evidently still running). However, when I click the + to add a new counter, perfmon crashes during the enumeration process and never populates the dialog.

Prior to this 18 minute dead stop, perfmon is running correctly.

Note that system setup is identical to the way I had things under 1709.

(I said it was a strange one ).

Best,

Marc

Edit to remove HTML

Thanks! I’ve deleted it and will follow your advice.

Yes, windows update service is running.

Yep, OK – I’m not seeing anything shown at all on the WUShowHide “hide hidden updates” dialog. My last update was December 27th, as stated.