DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION caused by Creative Cloud?

Hi All,

I'm encountering the same issue with my setup and wanted to leave a record of my case for reference.

PC Specs:
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
ASUS ProArt Z890
192GB DDR5-5600 (crucial)
RTX 4060 Ti 16GB
Windows 11 Pro (Build 24H2)

The symptoms are identical to those described in this thread, with DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION errors linked to Creative Cloud processes. In my case, the issue occurs when using sleep or hibernation modes. Initially, it appeared approximately every 20 days, but recently, it has started occurring as frequently as every 10 days.

However, it has not occurred within a single day so far. As a temporary workaround, shutting down the PC daily might help avoid the issue.

I'm curious if anyone has tested swapping the CPU to a Core Ultra 7 or Core Ultra 5 to see if the issue persists on those models.

Hopefully, Adobe releases a patch soon to address this.

Hello All,

I looked at the content of Adobe Creative Cloud - Wikipedia and it does not correspond with any of my hobbies, but I do like researching software problems. I contributed a response to Trying to fix BSOD, DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION, Bugcheck 0x00000133 - Microsoft Q&A and sensed that there was an interesting software problem at its root.

In the stack traces of your crash dumps, you will have probably noticed that nt!KiAbProcessThreadLocks and nt!KiAbEntryGetLockedHeadEntry always appear. The letters “Ab” are a reference to “AutoBoost” – a feature introduced into Windows to tackle the problem of Priority Inversion - Win32 apps | Microsoft Learn.

The 7th edition of the book “Windows Internals” mentions AutoBoost and says, in closing:

"Future versions of Windows may implement Autoboost for user-mode accessible objects that have an owner-ship concept, such as critical sections."

At the time the book was published, the AutoBoost feature was only applied to suitable kernel locking mechanisms but it now applies to user-mode critical sections too.

As mentioned in this thread, user-mode code should not be able to crash the Windows operating system, but there is probably a small weakness that Creative Cloud is uncovering. Creative Cloud is probably also doing something unusual (perhaps contravening the documented “correct use” of critical sections).

Exactly what the root cause of the problem is, and why it only affects a small number of users is something that still needs to be determined.

My reason for posting here is to see if we can collaborate in finding an explanation. I have a few ideas as to how one could proceed.

Even in a minidump file, the last few events logged to the System event log are saved. These events might not have been saved to disk before the system crashed. In the case that I looked at on Microsoft Q&A, there were Kernel-CPU-Starvation events occurring in node.exe. It seems as though node.exe had been “sailing close to the wind” in the moments before the crash, spending more time than 1174 “ticks” in DPC routines – more than 1280 (0x500) ticks triggers a system crash (DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION).

It would be interesting to know if anyone has such events in their System event log; for example, does Creative Cloud sometimes come close to causing a crash and then recover?

In a larger dump file (e.g. an Active or Complete memory dump), the state of all threads can be examined (necessary when investigating multithreading issues). The AutoBoost state for a thread can be found via the thread’s KTHREAD structure:

   +0x470 KernelAbEntries  : 0xffffcc07`fbcf5900 _KLOCK_ENTRIES
   +0x478 UserAbEntries    : (null)
0: kd> dt nt!_KLOCK_ENTRIES ffffcc07`fbcf5900
   +0x000 Thread           : 0xffffcc07`fbcf5080 _KTHREAD
   +0x008 AvailableEntryBitmap : 0x3f
   +0x00a OrphanedEntryBitmap : 0
   +0x00c EntryCount       : 0x6 ''
   +0x00d Padding0         : [3]  ""
   +0x010 Entries          : [1] _KLOCK_ENTRY
0: kd> dt nt!_KLOCK_ENTRY ffffcc07`fbcf5900+10
   +0x000 LockState        : _KLOCK_ENTRY_LOCK_STATE
   +0x000 LockUnsafe       : (null)
   +0x000 CrossThreadReleasableAndBusyByte : 0 ''

Examination of these structures might help to identify the reason for the (near?) deadlock that leads to the crash. As Ethan330163914y0a pointed out, the absence of symbolic information for the Adobe components makes analysis more difficult (perhaps even impracticable).

Sharing such dump files can be a security risk so I just mention the possibility rather than recommending the step.

A less risky option is to use Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). This mechanism can be used to trace some aspects of AutoBoost, Critical Section, SpinLock and thread scheduling behaviour:

The output of an ETW session (a “.etl” file) can be viewed with Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA); unfortunately, WPA cannot perform much analysis of these particular events (they most just appear as:

“Generic” events), but it can provide reassurance about the type of information potentially being shared:

My initial suggestion would be to perform a short trace to see whether that gives and insights into the “normal” behaviour of “Creative Cloud.exe” and node.exe with respect to critical sections.

I have attached a Windows Performance Record (WPR) Profile (WPRP) file that could be used to configure a suitable trace. The configuration includes the “Critical Section Trace Provider” but this only traces processes that have enabled such tracing via the “TracingFlags” value of the Image File Execution Options | Microsoft Learn (IFEO) for the executable (for test purposes, I used msedge.exe since I have not installed Adobe Creative Cloud); the flag for Critical Section tracing is 2 (and only processes started after the flag has been set will be eligible for tracing).

The Critical Section tracing is probably not essential (I think that the information it provides can mostly be inferred from other events); time and experience of looking at the trace files will probably suggest refinements to the tracing configuration recommendations.

A trace session can be started with the command “wpr -start ab.wprp!Bespoke -filemode” (assuming that the attached file has been saved in the current directory as “ab.wprp” (removing the ".txt" extension)). The trace session is stopped with the command “wpr -stop why.etl” (“why.etl” can be a file name of your choice).

Gary

Hi everyone,

+1 on this, I haven't read through the whole thread but, WinDbg has come back with node.exe and Creative Cloud as the faulting process every time.

I first thought it was node.exe from the Nvidia Driver, so have been shutting down the Nvidia app which has seemed to help in that the BSOD has occurred betwen 4 and 6 days uptime instead of 2 days. And 

The last time I had anything like this was around the time of the Nvidia GTX 770, and Nvidia's driver would cause a crash after, I think it was 36 hours, and that was a DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION.

Back on topic, I too am running an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, along with an Asus ProArt Z890, and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, but I was getting exactly the same on my RTX 3060 so ruled that out.

Anyway, I hope Adobe get this issue sorted asap! 

I also get this crash every few days, but only if I have Creative Cloud installed. PC is less than a year old. Tech support at the company that built the PC are the ones who pointed out to me that Creative Cloud was behind the crashes. For 4 weeks I uninstalled CC and had no crashes. Then I reinstalled CC and immediately crashes started again. Like for the OP, they usually happen when the PC is not being used.

There was a point at which these crashes did not happen but I'm not sure how long ago it was or which version of CC did not cause crashes. It has been like this for a few months.

PC specs:

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K @ 3.70 GHz

Kingston FURY BEAST RGB 64 GB RAM

ASUS ROG STRIX Z890-E gaming motherboard

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition 24 GB

OS drive Kingston FURY Renegade 4TB

Data drive Kingston FURY Renegade 4TB

Windows 11

Latest crash reports via WhoCrashed:

On Thu 8/28/2025 11:42:34 AM your computer crashed or a problem was reported

On Thu 8/28/2025 11:42:34 AM your computer crashed or a problem was reported

+1 this issue.  I built a new computer earlier this year and started getting this exact BSOD related to Creative Cloud/node.exe shortly after installing CC.  I uninstalled CC after and was stable for a long time but eventually needed photoshop again.

I was able to get some semblance of stability with CC by renaming all the node.exe files to node.bak  but eventually the product updated and repaired those exe and now it's crashing again

I see crashes typically within 48 hours and not always when the computer is Idle.  when it first started happening I would get BSOD in the middle of a game.  I chased general forums on watchdog errors for weeks now before finding this thread. did memory tests, driver updates everything. 

Unfortunately I'm also a RTX 50xx and Intel CoreUltra 9 285K computer so while I do think this is an issue with Creative Cloud (nothing else causes this) likely the problem is endemic to this hardware.  Given the popularity and broader adoption of the RTX 50xx series cards i'm leaning towards this being a bad interaction with the CPU.  

I don't see Adobe or Intel fixing this any time soon, at least not directly.  Though perhapse narrowing it to CPU might help find a workaround, maybe disabling some CPU features via BIOS or whatnot will stop the issue. 

Thanks @aaron.thomas and @rosmo01 for echoing the issue as well, and if any other users saw this post having the issue as well, please don't be silents, we need your +1 to convence community expert that this is a serious issue.

As @Ethan330163914y0a  and @rosmo01 pointed out, this is not a simple issue that average user could find where to blame, and it's so random that some PC may encounter that in the future. Even if it's already BSODed on 100,000 PCs, it's still possible that only 10 users have the willing and ability to find the root cause. Please let software engineering engage in it, it's beyond the knowledge requirement of tech support.

Btw, for all other users who are affected, would you mind if sharing hardware config in case the issue could be related to specific hardware? As I believe you all on latest software / system update / drivers / firmware so those information. Mine is Ultra 9 285k + RTX 5080.

I was on vacation in the past weeks which is why I was silent, but my PC was on during that time with Adobe background processes disabled. No BSOD for 5 weeks now. I'm planning to upgrade to a Gen 5 SSD this or next week, and will install clean OS then. So far I have not decided if I want to install Creative Cloud, or if I will disable all background processes.

Also update my latest status. After I disabled all Creative Cloud related processes, no BSDO so far for more than 2 weeks. However that is not long enough since 2 of my previous crashes were 14 days apart.

I am experiencing exactly the same problem here on Win 11, and have been sporadically since May 25th of this year. The sporadic DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATIONs, when they can be traced back to a specific app, always seem to originate in Creative Cloud. This is a huge problem and majorly impacts the stability of my OS. Please investigate this.

Yes, exactly, Windows 11 is basicly Windows 10 with UI and other changes, the system version is still Windows 10.

If you don't believe, check your Windows 11 PC, open regedit, and check the value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProductName, you will find your Windows 11 is actually Windows 10.

OSNAME:  Windows 10

is win 11?