DWM.EXE stopped working

[Braiboo99]

I reinstalled my display drivers recently after using DDU multiple ties and as I went into the search bar on the bottom left the search host crashed but half my screen went black with it. I know search host was having issues but DWM was a first and i'm worried it's related to me using DDU. Any ideas what could have caused the problem?

[Illusion of Progress]

That is the windows desktop manager. It's far more likely some other issue (video card or drivers is a good bet) is cascading into bringing it down rather than the issue being with dwm.exe itself, but you can repair Windows to rule that out. Whenever you see dwm.exe or smss.exe faulting, it's usually not them directly faulting; it's some other issue occurring and they go down with it.

Using DDU will not break the windows desktop manager.

[N3tRunn3r]

The DWM.exe in Windows 11 has a memory leak for many months. Its RAM useage will exceed 9 GB and more, if it bugs out. To kill its process multiple times in a row will fix it until it happens again. Alone in January 2024 it had exceeded 6 GB and in February 2024 about freaking 10 GB .. !! So if you see the DWM.exe has accumulated more than 400 MB, kill its process multiple times in a row, and restart your machine afterwards. It size should be between 60 MB - 150 MB only ..

If this same memory leak to DWM.exe happens in Windows 10, I am not sure.

Tip: Let Windows Update install your iGPU drivers, only manually install drivers for your dGPU.

I never use DDU, never needed for an Intel/NVIDIA machine..

Well, there a lot of these complaints throughout many Microsoft topics:

Official Micrososft Feedback-Hub
Windows 11 - DWM Consuming Too Much Memory

https://aka.ms/AAd833n

P.s.: Yesterday Windows 11 just received an important Update (KB5034765) for future preperations. Install it.