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Kernel-Power 41

WARDOGS hard-reboots the whole PC at anti-cheat start, no BSOD

Published Data as of Season 1 · 10 Sept 2026

This one is on your machine

No fix is confirmed yet. Disabling Hyper-V/VBS stopped it for some players and not others, and Bulkhead has not replied in the thread this page is sourced from.

What you see

The whole machine hard-reboots — not just the game closing or a crash to desktop — around the point Elytra anti-cheat starts. Windows Event Viewer logs Kernel-Power, Event ID 41, BugcheckCode 0: no blue screen, no memory dump, no WHEA error to point at.

Also reported as: Kernel-Power 41 · Event ID 41 · kernel power 41 · PC hard reboot on launch · computer restarts playing WARDOGS

Fixes, in the order worth trying

Work top to bottom and stop when the game launches. Each step is labelled with how much evidence sits behind it, so you can skip the guesses if the first ones work.

  1. 01 Try disabling Hyper-V, VBS, the Windows Sandbox and Guarded Host

    Reported

    This is the one fix reported to work in the thread, for a player on a different rig (AceARN1337). It did not fix the original poster's crash, who already had all of it disabled — so treat it as worth ten minutes, not a guaranteed cure.

  2. 02 Rule out an overclock or a PSU under load

    Unconfirmed

    A Kernel-Power 41 with no BSOD is the generic Windows signature of a sudden power loss to the board, which is why it usually gets treated as a hardware question first. One player in the thread reset to BIOS-optimised defaults and it did not help, so it is not a given here — but it costs nothing to check voltages and drop any overclock before assuming the game caused it.

  3. 03 On Nvidia, try reverting to an older driver

    Reported

    One player in the thread fixed an apparently identical crash this way. It has not been reported by anyone on AMD, including the original poster, who is on a 7900 XTX.

  4. 04 If you get an actual BSOD instead, read the bugcheck code — do not assume it is the same fault

    Confirmed

    The original poster later caught one real blue screen mid-thread, CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT (0x101), with Elytra's driver present in the dump. That points at the anti-cheat's own kernel driver rather than the VBS/Hyper-V path other players found — two different crashes that happen to look alike from the outside. A dump changes what you should be troubleshooting.

Did this fix it for you?

Notes from other players who hit this code. Say what worked, what did not, and which region you are in — a fix that only works in one place is worth knowing about. Best-rated first, and there is no time limit: an answer from the first beta is still an answer.

No comments yet. Be the first to say whether this worked.

This is a different animal from a normal crash page, and worth saying plainly: most of what this hub can tell you about a WARDOGS crash starts from a bugcheck code or a memory dump. This one has neither. Kernel-Power 41 is Windows' way of logging "the machine came back up after not being told it was going down" — it fires the same way for a bad PSU, an overclock giving out under load, and a driver that took the whole box down with it. The event itself does not say which.

What the thread has actually tested

The original report and its replies span several different rigs — Ryzen 9 7900X/RX 7900 XTX, and at least two others — all hard-rebooting at or near Elytra's start-up, none of them Bulkhead-acknowledged as of this writing. Two things came out of it worth carrying forward: the crash is not obviously hardware-specific, since it is not confined to one CPU or GPU vendor, and it is not obviously one crash either — the fixes that worked for some players did nothing for others, which is the pattern you get when a symptom has more than one cause behind it.

Why this sits next to, not inside, the BSOD page

If Windows does give you a blue screen and a bugcheck code for a WARDOGS crash, that page is the one to read, and the kernel-driver-conflict page for inpoutx64.sys is worth ruling out too, since RGB and motherboard-suite drivers are a known, fixable cause of a similar-looking crash. This page exists for the case those don't cover: nothing in Event Viewer but Kernel-Power 41 and a BugcheckCode of 0, which is the signature of a crash that told Windows nothing on its way down. What anti-cheat WARDOGS runs, and what it hooks into →

Source

Helliath, "WARDOGS hard reboots my entire PC on launch — Kernel-Power 41, no BSOD, no dump", WARDOGS Steam Discussions, 16 September 2026 ↗

If that did not do it