[2004, 20h2] Surface Pro 7 intermittently freezes & cuts to black screen when using pen

[Jainslie]

Hi there,

 

We've just rolled out deployment of Surface Pros to our teaching staff, unfortunately there seems to be a nasty bug where the screen freezes & goes black when you attempt to use the pen. The issue is covered on this page - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/all/surface-pro-7-crashes-when-using-a-pen-with-an/82ef28e5-5244-45a1-ba80-27549a545ee0?rtAction=1615808474829&page=1 in particular in the comment by Kelan:

 

"This has been bothering us for months. Every time one of our users went to use their Surface Pen on their Surface Pro 7 in OneNote, their screen would flash black. At times, it would disconnect them from Miracast. Sometimes the entire device would freeze requiring a forced reset. Other times, Teams would crash in the background and black out requiring a forced quit via task manager. All of these issues were caused by using the pen. We have over 100 Surface devices in our environment (school), all with this problem.

 

After weeks of digging and trial and error (with growing frustration amongst staff), I narrowed it down to a DWM.exe crash (as reported in event viewer):

Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\dwm.exe

Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll

As far as I can tell, this being caused by an incompatible Intel Iris Graphics driver that installed itself as part of the 2004 or 20H2 update."

We've tried the fix outlined in Kelan's comment but it doesn't seem to have worked, has anyone else encountered this and managed to resolve it? We're trying the intel driver assistant now as that is also suggested in the thread but hopefully someone has come across this before

 

Cheers