XPS 15 9530 - BSOD CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED caused by DellSupportAss / SupportAssist Remediation 5.5.16.0

@degasus​ Thank you! We will do the same.

You only need to uninstall the Dell SupportAssist Remediation software. It is not needed if you are supporting your own fleet of Dell laptops.  FYI, you can push out a registry setting via GPO to disable the related service, but, the service will eventually reset back and start up again! 

Same exact problem on Dell Inspiron 3020.  What is the fix?

Same here on an Alienware M16 R2 — exact same issue.

I’ve been dealing with the same random BSODs (“Critical Process Died – 0xEF”) during the last days, and after checking the minidumps with WinDbg I got the same culprit:

0xEF_DellSupportAss_BUGCHECK_CRITICAL_PROCESS

In my case the crashes happened every 20–60 minutes, completely at random. Hardware diagnostics were clean, SSD and RAM healthy, BIOS fine… nothing pointed to a hardware failure.

I uninstalled:

• Dell SupportAssist

• SupportAssist Remediation

• OS Recovery Plugin

…the system became 100% stable again.

So yes, it definitely looks like the latest SupportAssist update is causing these crashes on the M16 R2. Hopefully Dell takes a look at this because it’s affecting more users than it seems.

Same problem - laptop was rebooting every 37 minutes. Uninstalled Dell SupportAssist. All good.

I have the exact same issue, also since the update a couple of days ago. Rather than uninstallating the remediation software, will Dell provide a software update?

@ThomasDe82​ I don't have exact confirmation on what our fix will be or an ETA on it. That said, it would be likely for us to role out some sort of hot patch. For the time being, I would recommend disabling the Dell Support Assist Remediation service as this is what users have reported to have resolved the issue for now. 

I work in a large school district and we are seeing this happen all over the district now. Has DELL even acknowledged the issue yet?

@DELL-Daniel V​ this does not work unless you diasble it from the BIOS. Even if the service is "disabled", it auto restarts on its own!

@degasus​ Could you share your script details so that other users can have a frame of reference? 

@DELL-Daniel V​ We have on-prem MECM and most of our users connect to our internal network over a VPN. I created a script that will uninstall the software regardless of the version.

MECM Deployment:

• Created Device Group to find all Dell Laptops and named it “Dell Systems Only”
• Verified list is accurate
• Created Applications Deployment that runs a script after verifying system meets criteria. The script uninstalls the software.

Steps:

1. From MECM, go to Software Library, Application Management, Applications. 
2. Right click blank area and choose Create Application.
3. Select “Manually specify the application information” and click Next
4. Give it a descriptive name, i.e. DellSARUninstall and click Next 2x’s.
5. From the Deployment Types, click Add…, select “Manually specify the deployment type information and click Next.
6. Give it a descriptive name and click Next.
7. Under the “Specify the command used to install this content” section, enter the following dummy command in the Installation Program field (as MECM requires this field be filled in): cmd.exe /c echo "Dummy Install"
8. Under the Uninstall program field, enter the following script and then click Next:

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -NoProfile -WindowStyle Hidden -Command "$p=@('HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*','HKLM:\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*'); Get-ItemProperty $p -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Where-Object { $_.DisplayName -match 'SupportAssist Remediation' } | ForEach-Object { if ($_.UninstallString -match 'MsiExec') { Start-Process msiexec.exe -ArgumentList '/x', $_.PSChildName, '/qn', '/norestart' -Wait -NoNewWindow } elseif ($_.UninstallString -match '\"(.*?)\"') { if (Test-Path $matches[1]) { Start-Process -FilePath $matches[1] -ArgumentList '/uninstall /quiet /norestart' -Wait -NoNewWindow } } }"

This script will work regardless of the version of the Dell SupportAssist Remediation installed.

9. For the Detection Method, click on Add Clause… and add the following:
   1. Setting Type: File System
   2. Type: Folder
   3. Path: C:\Program Files\Dell\SARemediation
   4. File or folder name: agent
   5. Select “This file or folder is associated with a 32-bit application on a64-bit systems”.
   6. Leave the “The file system setting must exist on the target system to indicate presence of this application” selected.
10. Click Ok 3x’s.
11. Right click the new Application you just created and click Deploy
12. Click Browse… to select the Collection to deploy against and click OK. (Hint: You may need to change the drop down from “User” to “Device” to see the Device Collection you should have already created/have for just your Dell Systems.
13. Click Next on the Content screen.
14. From the Deployment Settings, change the Action to uninstall and click Next.
15. Leave the Scheduling at default of “As soon as possible…” and click
16. Modify the User Experience as desired and click Next. I personally changed it to “Display in Software Center and only show notifications for computer restarts.”
17. Click Next through remaining screens and click on Close.
18. You can watch the status from Monitoring -> Deployments->Your New Deployment

kudos should go to @Sygent who first posted about the issue and also found the workaround to either disable the SA Remediation service or uninstall it completely. thanks much

@Sygent​ Yeah, the thing is though that this is the second time SupportAssist causes major issues for me (on my previous laptop, it somehow caused HUGE latency spikes making it impossible to work with audio-related software so I was forced to remove it back then as well). For the time being I am going to rely on Windows Update + manually updating drivers / firmware (regularly checking the Dell repo).

@Bug80​ ,

1. Yeah, the thing is though that this is the second time SupportAssist causes major issues for me (on my previous laptop, it somehow caused HUGE latency spikes making it impossible to work with audio-related software so I was forced to remove it back then as well).

2. For the time being I am going to rely on Windows Update + manually updating drivers / firmware (regularly checking the Dell repo).

1. Correct.

I've been volunteering my time here for over 15 years. Seems like a few times now some deal-breaker thing pops-up with Support-Assist (as they change it architecturally). There are other Dell Processes and Services (like Fusion) that can cause issues as well. 

But actually crashing Windows-11 is a big deal. I have 5 Windows-11 computers here (all a few years old, desktop and laptops). I can't say that I've ever seen any of them crash on Windows-11 (as bullet-proof as it is).

2. Smart. Not sure why people think you need all these Dell programs to run: Windows-11, programs, and games.