Random exceptions and screen blackouts

[CalvinWilkinson]

Microsoft PowerToys version

0.80.0

Installation method

GitHub

Running as admin

Yes

Area(s) with issue?

General

Steps to reproduce

Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce the issue. It just happens randomly. All of my screens go black for about 5 or so seconds and then upon returning, I get a message box with an error.

The first time it happened, there message box error was a low-level exception from Spotify. The exception was coming from Windows. Spotify did not restart or shut down. I did not get the error message for the first occurrence of the issue.

The second time, it was the same thing about 5 minutes later but the error message was dotnet.exe. The error message box was the same as the dotnet error as it was for the Spotify one.

Error Message:

The first time I got the error message, I did not think it was PowerToys so I thought it was a Spotify issue. But the same behavior happened 5 minutes later but with dotnet.exe instead. The second time though, a powertoys was displayed with error information but this did not show the first time. I am assuming at this point based on what I saw, that they were both a power toys issue.

Here is the bug report: PowerToysReport_2024-04-08-11-44-24.zip

✔️ Expected Behavior

1. No exceptions to be thrown.
2. No screen blackout

❌ Actual Behavior

1. Screens blacked out
2. Exception/message box was shown.

Other Software

No response

[github-actions[bot]]

Hi I'm an AI powered bot that finds similar issues based off the issue title.

Please view the issues below to see if they solve your problem, and if the issue describes your problem please consider closing this one and thumbs upping the other issue to help us prioritize it. Thank you!

Open similar issues:

• Unexpected black screen (#20053), similarity score: 0.77

Closed similar issues:

• Bug report (#22402), similarity score: 0.78
• Screen went black, only mouse pointer visible (#31997), similarity score: 0.77
• Error (#31421), similarity score: 0.77
• Displays turned black (#31168), similarity score: 0.77

Note: You can give me feedback by thumbs upping or thumbs downing this comment.

[CalvinWilkinson]

This issue can be closed. This does not happen anymore, and when it occurred, it was on a different machine. I have a new machine now and so far I have not seen this occur.