Microsoft has released an important fix for a critical Bluetooth bug that was causing blue screens of death (BSODs) on Windows 10 since the January KB5009596 builds. The fix was issued via the latest Windows 10 builds 19042.1620, 19043.1620, and 19044.1620, under KB5011543, that were released earlier today.
Here"s how Microsoft describes the issue:
After installing KB5009596 or later updates, some organizations which have Windows devices paired to Bluetooth devices might receive an error message "Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart." with a blue screen and "Stop code: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL". The error logged on affected devices will be in the System log in Event Viewer and will be logged as "Microsoft-Windows-WER-SystemErrorRe event 1001" with text "The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000000a ". This issue is observed when certain Configuration service provider (CSP) policies are in place which affect the Bluetooth A2dp profile. It can be observed from one of two scenarios:
- During the restart at the end of the update installation process, if the Windows client device was previously paired with mobile phones or with other audio devices via Bluetooth.
- After updates are installed, at the moment users pair their updated Windows client device with a new mobile phone or audio device via Bluetooth.
Since CSPs are generally associated with enterprise environments, home users are likely to be unaffected by this.
A workaround for IT administrators has also been provided by Microsoft:
To mitigate this issue, IT administrators using Intune or other tools can modify the Windows registry before installing this update following the steps below:
- Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PolicyManager\current\device\Bluetooth\
- Add the following registry entry: {0000110a-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb} and {0000110b-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb} to the ServicesAllowedList value
You may find more details on the official Microsoft page.