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SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

WARDOGS blue-screens Windows on launch

Published Data as of Season 1 · 10 Sept 2026

This one is not your machine

A conflict between the anti-cheat and Windows virtualisation. Team17 support tells players to turn off Hyper-V, Windows Sandbox, WSL2 and the Virtual Machine Platform, and several players report that this fixed it. Several others turned all of it off and still crashed, so treat it as the first step rather than the answer.

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What you see

Windows blue-screens, or the machine restarts outright, while WARDOGS is starting — usually on the anti-cheat loading screen, sometimes before any window appears. The stop code is SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, often with 0x7E and 0xFFFFFFFFC0000005, and frequently no crash dump is written at all.

Also reported as: SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED · 0x7E · 0xFFFFFFFFC0000005 · blue screen on launch · pc restarts when launching wardogs · hyper-v · virtualisation · virtualization

What to do instead

The cause is not on your machine, so reinstalling and verifying will not reach it. These are the things that actually help while it lasts.

  1. 01 Turn off every Windows virtualisation feature, then reboot

    Confirmed

    This is Team17 support's own instruction, posted in the pinned crashes thread and repeated in at least six others since 12 September: disable all virtualisation in Windows, such as Hyper-V, Windows Sandbox, WSL2, the Virtual Machine Platform and containers. In Windows, open "Turn Windows features on or off" and clear Hyper-V, Virtual Machine Platform, Windows Hypervisor Platform, Windows Sandbox, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Containers and Guarded Host. Then, in an admin command prompt, run bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off and restart the machine.

  2. 02 Turn virtualisation off in the BIOS as well

    Reported

    Two players who still crashed after clearing the Windows features got in once they also disabled virtualisation in the firmware — the setting is called SVM on AMD boards and VT-x or Intel Virtualization Technology on Intel ones. Worth doing before you conclude the step above did not work, and worth reversing if you need virtual machines for anything else.

  3. 03 Remove Dr.Web, and the Windows update Team17 names

    Confirmed

    The same support post asks players to remove Dr.Web anti-malware, and to uninstall Windows update KB5121003. Both come from Team17 rather than from players, and neither has a public explanation attached.

  4. 04 Repair Windows after each crash

    Confirmed

    A hard crash can leave system files damaged, which makes the next crash likelier and muddies what you are testing. Team17's instruction is to run DISM and then sfc /scannow from an admin prompt, and reboot, after any full PC crash.

  5. 05 Try a clean boot before you reinstall anything

    Unconfirmed

    One player whose machine restarted on launch got past it with a clean boot — msconfig, Selective startup, non-Microsoft services hidden and disabled — after the virtualisation steps alone had not worked. A single report, but it costs one restart and it finds a conflicting background program faster than uninstalling things one at a time.

  6. 06 If it still crashes, post the stop code rather than reinstalling again

    Reported

    Reinstalling the game, the anti-cheat and Windows itself are all in the reports already, and none of them ended the crash. A post on the Report a Problem board carrying your stop code, your GPU and driver version, your Windows build and whether virtualisation is on is worth more than another reinstall.

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 the crash that takes the whole machine with it. WARDOGS starts, the anti-cheat loading screen appears, and Windows blue-screens with SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED — or the computer simply restarts, with no blue screen and no dump file to read afterwards. It began with Early Access rather than in the betas, and it is the most common full-system crash on the Report a Problem board.

What is known

Team17 support has one answer, and it is virtualisation. Since 12 September its instruction has been the same in every thread: turn off Hyper-V, Windows Sandbox, WSL2, the Virtual Machine Platform and containers. The fullest version of the post adds removing Dr.Web, uninstalling Windows update KB5121003, and repairing Windows with DISM and sfc /scannow after a crash.

It works, for some machines. Four separate players reported that clearing the Windows virtualisation features, with bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off alongside, ended the crashes; two more needed the BIOS setting off as well.

And it does not work for others. Four detailed reports describe turning off the whole hypervisor stack — including the BIOS options, IOMMU and Control Flow Guard — and crashing exactly as before, in one case on the same instruction inside the anti-cheat's own runtime library. Anyone telling you virtualisation is the cause is going further than the evidence does.

[!IMPORTANT] On Windows 11 Home, this fix may not stick. Players on 25H2 report that virtualisation-based security switches itself back on after a reboot and that the bcdedit change is reverted. Nobody has published a way round that, and it is the single biggest gap on this page.

What has not worked

Worth knowing before you spend an evening on it. Turning off Memory Integrity, which fixes several other WARDOGS launch faults, failed for nine of the ten players who tried it here. Reinstalling the game, reinstalling the anti-cheat and reinstalling Windows are all in the reports, and none of them ended the crash. One player cleared it by disabling Windows dtrace, which is a single report and nothing more.

No patch has named this crash. Launch Stability Hotfix #1 and Patch 0.11 both addressed crashes, and 0.11 says "more GPU crashes addressed", but neither mentions virtualisation or this stop code, and reports continued after 14 September.

While it is happening

Stop playing until it stops crashing. A blue screen mid-write is how a working install becomes a broken one, and every crash gives you another set of damaged system files to repair. The blue screen and system crash page covers the older stop codes and the repair sequence in more detail, and what the anti-cheat is explains what it is doing on your machine while the game runs.

If your machine survives but the game does not, the crash is a different one: crash on launch covers the game closing on its own.

Source

Team17 support, pinned crashes thread, Steam, 12 September 2026 ↗

If that did not do it