If your PC games started freezing or hard-crashing after the last big Windows update, you're not imagining it. Microsoft's August security update, KB5121003, went out on August 11 and has been knocking over a handful of games ever since — freezes, sudden closes, EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION errors, and on some machines a full reboot.
What's affected
The confirmed list so far is ARC Raiders, The Finals and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, all on Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. Two of those are Embark Studios games, and Embark is the one that actually worked out what's going on while Microsoft was still writing "we are investigating."
The culprit is a kernel driver called inpoutx64.sys. The update changed something it relied on, and anything using that driver can fall over. It's not exclusive to those three games — they're just where it showed up loudest.
The fix, and the catch
Embark's workaround is to stop the inpoutx64 service and delete the file from C:\Windows\System32\drivers\, then restart. That gets the games running again.
Here's the honest bit: the clean-and-simple version of this is "just uninstall KB5121003," but that update closes more than 400 security vulnerabilities, so rolling it back to play a shooter is a genuinely bad trade. Deleting the single driver is the narrower move. If you're not comfortable poking around in the drivers folder, waiting for a proper patch is the sensible call.
Microsoft has acknowledged the reports and says it's checking whether the fault is on its end, but there's no official fix yet. Its ask, for now, is that affected players file it through the Feedback Hub. In other words: the community found the workaround first, and the platform holder is catching up.
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