HELP NEEDED! Win7 DWM.EXE issues upon install any m$ rollup of 2018

Thanks for your replay. I did read all I could find about the Spectre-Meltdown registry settings and I did also try all possible combinations. But on my machine it did not make any difference. At 1.6 GHz (60%) everything runs fine. At 1.2 GHz (50%), no, a crash before you can say sh..

In the mean time, I took your suggestion and changed to Windows 7 x64. That meant a re-install from scratch. So the 32 bit environment that I had is now only in backup. Using 64 bit now. Same setup.

Please I meant no offense to anyone. I am not accusing MS of anything and I am not pretending that I have a better solution ! In fact, I don't have any solution myself. If it was not for your excellent work here I would never even have known what the problem was, let alone what the possible remedy would be. I am very grateful for your efforts. By myself I would have probably concluded that this machine should go in the garbage can. Even though I know it was working perfectly untill MS started to fix things ...

The whole story of Spectre/Meltdown seems a little exagerated to me, especially for my machine. It is mostly academic. I see the true solution only at hardware level. A job for the CPU manufacturers. In fact, I expect to hear a lot more about similar type of bugs in the near future. There may come a point when software fixing becomes intolerable.

What I don't understand, we seem to be able to switch off the Spectre-Meltdown fix with registry settings. But why then can I not lower the CPU speed if I do that ?

OK, I understan, I will try that. But it means that I have to uninstall until Dec 2017 level and then install Nov 2018 immediately after that. My visible ram is now 4G, so I will need to set the pagesize to 6G. I am not sure if I correctly understood the meaning of the registry values. I thought that when disabling the Spectre/Meltdown protection, I should have the same performance and CPU load as I had until Dec 2017. But that does not seem to be the case. I thought that I could just go back to minimum of 5% because the fixes are disabled and do not require more load than when not installed. Did I make any sense here?

Anyway it may take me a little while before I can do these operations. Please bear with me.

My visible ram is now 4G, so I will need to set the pagesize to 6G.

Pls just set pagefle size to Recommended!!!!!! win7 will do the rest by itself!

I thought that when disabling the Spectre/Meltdown protection, I should have the same performance and CPU load as I had until Dec 2017.

It's a wrong guess. Unfortunately!!!!

I thought that I could just go back to minimum of 5% because the fixes are disabled and do not require more load than when not installed. Did I make any sense here?

Again. It's a wrong guess. A turning off Spectre or Meltdown or both in win7 registry never returns to all known CPUs (maybe except just introduced intel 9th gen ones) full performance. So if you wanna the full performance as before 2018 pls stay on Dec2017 rollup!

p.s. no problem here. I'm not in hurry.

c ya then

Thanks for highlighting how wrong my assumptions are ! It was perhaps too naive of me. I was trying to test again, following all your directions, but I was interrupted and after retuning days later, I decided to give up. I am now using Win7 x64 for a while, with everything installed that I had in Win7 x86. I haven't had a crash in the nvidia driver yet. That makes me happy. And being on Dec2017 rollup, also no issue with DWM.

I decided to keep this system as it is. I am making here the assumption that in all the 2018 (and later) rollups are not going to be an significant improvement in anything. There are probably only security fixes on security fixes for Spectre/Meltdown type of vulnerabilities. I do not rate these as high risks.

Even if in future I would buy a new recent CPU, such as Coffee Lake, I would still want to use Win7 and I would also stop at Dec2017 rollups even though there should not be DWM crashes. But in my view Win7 is only getting more and more crippled ...

But then again, my assumptions could all be wrong again ?!

Thanks for all your help. I am coming back now on this topic, since it is not over. I have been using my laptop all this time without any issues. I am still on 2017-12 update level, with further updates only for other stuff (.NET Framework, etc), but no more roll-ups. However, they got me now. There is a new update KB4474419 for SHA-2 code signing support. It seems to be mandatory (in future). I installed it along with another update, can't remember the number. And the the DWM crashes started to appear again every few minutes or so.

This update KB4474419 contains an update to the processor driver (intelppm.sys). Remembering what you mentioned above, I strongly suspect this to be the culprit. Is there a way around it? Is this processor update really required for SHA-2 code signing, since the processor really did not change ? Can the MS driver still be used instead ?

If this issue can be solved without raising processor frequencies, perhaps I could continue to install the rollups as well ?

(I did in fact buy a second home PC, type all-in-one. It has an intel 300 series chipset. Impossible to use Windows 7 on it, since there seem to be no drivers for USB 3 for this chipset for WIndows 7 And since it is all-in-one, I cannot add another USB controller ! Argh, only choice here is to go to Windows 10. This all-in-one PC just makes a beautiful wall decoration at present. What a pitty !)

Thanks that's clear. For now I uninstalled this update. I wonder whether is would still be worth while to have new updates since updates are supposed to end anyway somewhere in January 2020 when extended support for Windows 7 runs out. My laptop is working just fine now. Especially with the new (old) nVidia driver that you mentioned above.

I checked the devices in my new all-in-one wall picture. The USB controller is:

PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_A36D&SUBSYS_84EE103C&REV_10\3&11583659&2&A0
Intel(R) USB 3.1 eXtensible Host Controller - 1.10 (Microsoft)

As far as I understand Intel never made a driver for it for Windows 7. Neither did MS. Would be great if you had any news on it !

1. Pls post motherboard full model name!
2. Pls post all compatible device IDs as my above sample!