Alienware 18 - USB Devices Causing Blue Screens

I own a mid-2013 Alienware 18. I’ve had consistent issues for the last several months regarding USB devices, often causing my computer to lock up & blue screen. There are many devices and circumstances that instigate this:

1)      If I attempt to wake my computer from sleep after closing the lid, and any USB devices are plugged in to my PC, the PC will often crash to blue screen. (Not 100% of the time, but frequently.) This has happened even with only a mouse plugged in.

2)      I have a Steinberg UR22 audio interface for music production. The audio will hitch and stutter for a fraction of a second moment at seemingly random times. I have an older NI Komplete 6 interface which caused blue screens, but I replaced it with the current Steinberg after hearing that it plays nicer with USB 3.0.

3)      Also related to music production, I bought a Virus TI desktop synthesizer. It interfaces with my computer via USB. After working without issue for several months, it now causes my computer to BSOD when I try to use it with the companion plugin in my DAW. It takes anywhere from several minutes to a few seconds for this to happen, but it’s consistent. Crashing is accompanied by a message in the plugin, “A SYNC ERROR OCCURRED PRESS STOP AND PLAY TO CLEAR.” I can stop the PC from crashing immediately by unplugging the synth when the message comes up. If I do this though, the PC will hang on the logoff screen if I try to shut down or restart the system. I will then have to do a hard reboot using the power button.

Late last year, I found a thread (I think it was maybe this one) that suggested uninstalling the Intel USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller drivers helped some earlier Alienware models. Unfortunately this just caused all of my USB devices to stop working. Reinstalling the eXtensible Host Controller drivers caused all sorts of other problems, such as my MIDI keyboard controller not working and external storage devices not connecting stably.

Over Christmas I did a fresh install of Windows on a new SSD, both as an upgrade and to hopefully wipe out all the issues. Unfortunately all the blue screen issues that happened before messing with the host controller drivers have still persisted, even with all the latest drivers and BIOS updates as of late December.

I’ve also tried enabling and disabling the USB debug mode in the BIOS and testing my synthesizer in ports on both sides of my computer. The computer still crashed after some time as usual.

The most recent blue screen error code is a 0xD1 issue. (link to the Microsoft description) The parameters were 2C, 2, 0, and FFFFF88004E2FF6C, in order.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. It’s driving me crazy, since while I can game I can’t really work on music until either this is fixed or I have to go buy another computer. Even confirmation that this is either a USB 3.0 or driver issue rather than hardware would be nice. (I’m not really that computer savvy…)