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NVIDIA app stops working and fullscreen breaks after optimizing #33

Description

@umarabdullah23

Reported by UnknownX4T (the same person who posts as 4t_talha, see #12) in a direct message to the owner on 2026-08-14 (12:58).

Verbatim, two messages in the same minute:

"and now my nvidia app isnt working"
"and anything cant be done on fullscreen"

What happened next: the owner replied "U have to reinstall Nvidia app". The user did — "i did but still ccant run". The next morning he wrote "sry bro mb ifixed it" / "but pc fixed". So it resolved on his side, the cause was never established, and it was never ticketed until now.

That a reinstall did not fix it is the useful detail: a broken NVIDIA install would have been repaired by reinstalling. Something outside the app was keeping it from running.

A likely cause was found — and has been fixed

An audit this week found that the process-reduction step could stop NVIDIA's background service — the component the NVIDIA app and Control Panel talk to. With that service down, the NVIDIA app opens and does nothing, and a reinstall does not help, which matches this report exactly.

There was a protection list meant to prevent precisely this, but it was only consulted at a couple of call sites instead of inside the code that actually stops things — so it was being bypassed. It has been made canonical and is now enforced in every stop/kill path, which is the same fix that closed two other never-kill gaps found in the same pass.

This is a plausible cause, not a proven one. Nobody reproduced this user's machine, and the fullscreen half is not explained with the same confidence — a display/scaling backend being unavailable is a reasonable explanation for both symptoms at once, but it has not been demonstrated.

What would settle it

  • @UnknownX4T: please retest on the next build and say whether the NVIDIA app still stops working after an optimize.
  • If it happens again, the useful information is: which level was run (Safe / Aggressive / MAX / MAX+Risky), whether the NVIDIA app was open at the time, and whether a reboot brought it back (it should, if a stopped service is the cause).

Honest status

Cause identified as likely and fixed; not confirmed against this report. Keeping this open until someone retests, because closing it on a code fix we never validated against the symptom is how it comes back.

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