[2020] Blue Screen - EasyAntiCheat.sys

Easy Anti-Cheat are keen to hear from players with this issue. Would you be willing to email our Easy Anti-Cheat representative if I were to provide you with his email address, please?

Thank you, I’ll ping you his email address right now.

Which Windows build are you running? Is it a normal build or any of the developer previews?

Does it matter which other programs you have running at the same time? (i.e., if it has happened multiple times, do you have any suspects?)

Practically 0x50 means that EAC (or another application, but in this case the BSOD point out EAC) tried to read from memory which is not in a paged area (i.e. used).

If you want to try some things during the weekend (i.e. before the EAC-rep gets back), I have two hypothesis:

• The first thing EAC (easy anti cheat) does is to inspect all running software on your system. If it only hangs at startup it is likely that something is fishy with something already running (could be anti-virus or malware). Try doing full system scans and also try disabling anti-virus at startup of Vermintide (EAC has a history of not always playing ball with antivirus).
• It is possible to get 0x50 when paging aggressively (i.e. writing or reading system memory contents to / from disk). How much RAM do you have? This would probably require 8Gb or less unless you are doing a lot of work in the background (like VMs or something else eating memory) to get an error of this kind at startup (i.e. I’m mentioning it because it is possible, not likely).

Razer Synapse 3, Razer Cortex, and Razer Chroma Kit are known to have had issues with EAC, but I thought they were fixed quite a while ago (before Vermintide supported Chroma).

I have no experience with Webroot though.

If you want to try something try disabling Chroma and Webroot. But intuitively I think it’s something else, both of them should be known by EAC, and EAC known by them.

EAC definitely identifies AHK, I thought it wouldn’t allow it actually, but should lead to “unsafe state” and not a crash.

Have you had any other memory related issues? Does the temperature of the room affect results? I.e. more likely to crash during the day when it is hotter?

I found something interesting when googling a bit, try “easyanticheat.sys page_fault_in_nonpaged_area”.

There are many reports saying that removing EasyAntiCheat.sys (default location C:\Program Files (x86)\EasyAntiCheat\) fixes it. EAC will just download a new version of it next time you run it, so don’t worry about it.

But to be safe, perhaps copy it to a backup location first so you can restore it if needed.

(I’m a bit involved in the EAC on Wine efforts, so EAC is particular interest of mine)

Did you remove EasyAntiCheat.sys before, or did you leave it?

Is your Windows instance weird in any way? (i.e. beta-build, developer-build, not an activated instance of windows, etc?)

Just to be clear, the BSOD is a consequence of the kernel driver EasyAntiCheat.sys somehow mismatching with your system (could be wrong version of the driver, modified windows kernel (such as a insider ring build), or something external causing the mismatch (such as overheating)).

Technically, this is (basically) the order of things when you start the game:

• The launcher starts
• You press play, which launches the actual game
• The actual game, during launch, loads EasyAntiCheat_x86.dll (which resides in the game folder in steam, i.e. if you install the game again you will get a new version of this file)
• EasyAntiCheat_x86.dll in turn loads the EasyAntiCheat.sys-driver, which resides in Program Files (x86). Sometimes the EasyAntiCheat.sys-driver is updated as well, although it seems a bit random when it is actually updated
• Now the game actually continues to launch, either normally if EAC loaded correctly, or with the “untrusted state” marker in the upper right corner if something went wrong with EAC.

EasyAntiCheat.sys-driver is the one creating your BSOD, since it is a kernel driver it can do “everything” on your computer and crashes the entire machine, rather than just the program (as would have been the case if EasyAntiCheat_x86.dll did something fishy).

Easy Anti-Cheat have identified and resolved the cause of the BSODs in a new update of theirs. We’ll be putting it live as soon as we can.

It’s live now. No action needed on your end, it should be automatic.