Armoury Crate damaged my whole system

[Era3tone]

So I bought a asus rog strix g few weeks back and now on after 2 weeks. It started giving me problems and I mean a lot of them.
So when I received the device, it worked great and everything was good for a week then suddenly the armoury crate stopped saving profiles or lost it's functionality. The aura sync was gone and the rgb was stuck on color cycle. Then some minor bugs came as well and I reset ed the laptop to maybe solve this issue.

After the reset and first boot the device seemed to work fine again but after a restart to install updates, the problems came so after some googling I choose to reset again and stop the asus live service under services.msc option. This option seemed to work, a had to suffer with some bad rgb but the laptop was working great again. But yesterday after some update or something the rog key to open the armoury crate does not work and also the fan change profile to set to other modes stopped working at all. I had to manually open armoury crate and there was no aura sync menu and the rgb was stuckeat color cycle now.

Then came another big blow and this was the most annoying, the laptop started to stutter a lot and was slow even in simple file transfer. I looked in the background processes and there was a process called armoury crate user session which was opening again and closing which maybe causing stutters but the laptop is seriously slow. I had a ssd installed and to transfer 3gb file it took me 30 min. I played csgo earlier and it ran at 140+ fps at high setting but after this problem, csgo ran at 50 fps with too many 1% low that it was not playable anymore. I did also installed drivers again manually but it did not solve the problem, I don't think it's a hardware problem as everything works after a reset but after a restart back to square one. If anyone also encountered this problem please do help me. I called for the asus service and hope they fix it fast as I have to leave for college in 2 weeks now.

This being my first Asus laptop and being greeted with this changed my mindset about the one time great asus. Still if anyone can please help me !

[VGAglory]

Unfortunately I am unable to provide answers but I can sympathise. I switched over from the original Aura Software to Asus Armoury Crate only because it popped up in the list of latest drivers/downloads for my Rampage VI Extreme mother board. What a mistake! Armoury has much less control of my motherboard lighting than Aura. It will control the motherboard lighting as a single unit whereas Aura allowed me to control individual lighting sections of my board. Armoury kept on waking my PC from sleep multiple times a day, until the point I got fed up and tried to revert to the original Aura software. This turned out to be a massive mistake. I made every attempt to cleanly uninstall Asus Armoury Crate, simply uninstalling the app left a lot of junk behind. Even when I scoured the entire hard drive/registry for every reference to Armoury Crate, Aura failed to regain control of my motherboard lighting. Random lighting changes, rapidly flashing colors, amongst many other problems. I gave up and resigned myself to reverting to Armoury Crate and a constantly waking PC, and tried to reinstall Armoury Crate. At this point the APP failed to install with an error message. No amount of effort allowed me to get it working. I was now stuck between a non working Armoury Crate and non-working Aura Sofware. In the end I had to do an image restore to a previous point in my PC's history. I am now stuck with Asus Armoury and all the woes associated with it. I fully appreciate Armoury crate is a beta piece of software, but my god, ASUS what are you thinking??? Has anyone worked out a way of completely and cleanly removing this pile of crap?

[Braegnok]

VGAglory wrote:
Unfortunately I am unable to provide answers but I can sympathise. I switched over from the original Aura Software to Asus Armoury Crate only because it popped up in the list of latest drivers/downloads for my Rampage VI Extreme mother board. What a mistake! Armoury has much less control of my motherboard lighting than Aura. It will control the motherboard lighting as a single unit whereas Aura allowed me to control individual lighting sections of my board. Armoury kept on waking my PC from sleep multiple times a day, until the point I got fed up and tried to revert to the original Aura software. This turned out to be a massive mistake. I made every attempt to cleanly uninstall Asus Armoury Crate, simply uninstalling the app left a lot of junk behind. Even when I scoured the entire hard drive/registry for every reference to Armoury Crate, Aura failed to regain control of my motherboard lighting. Random lighting changes, rapidly flashing colors, amongst many other problems. I gave up and resigned myself to reverting to Armoury Crate and a constantly waking PC, and tried to reinstall Armoury Crate. At this point the APP failed to install with an error message. No amount of effort allowed me to get it working. I was now stuck between a non working Armoury Crate and non-working Aura Sofware. In the end I had to do an image restore to a previous point in my PC's history. I am now stuck with Asus Armoury and all the woes associated with it. I fully appreciate Armoury crate is a beta piece of software, but my god, ASUS what are you thinking??? Has anyone worked out a way of completely and cleanly removing this pile of crap?

The short answer to completely and cleanly remove Armoury Crate. Do a new clean Windows install.

I spent hours searching, removing files. Googling things running in task manager after uninstalling it. And I was unable to completely and cleanly remove it. 🙂

[VGAglory]

Braegnok wrote:
The short answer to completely and cleanly remove Armoury Crate. Do a new clean Windows install.

I spent hours searching, removing files. Googling things running in task manager after uninstalling it. And I was unable to completely and cleanly remove it. 🙂

I suspected as much! 😞 I cant belive ASUS woud release such an aweful piece of software to replace the Aura Software. A massive step backwards!

[Braegnok]

VGAglory wrote:
I suspected as much! 😞 I cant belive ASUS woud release such an aweful piece of software to replace the Aura Software. A massive step backwards!

The Asus UEFI firmware exposes an ACPI table to Windows 10, called "WPBT" or "Windows Platform Binary Table". WPBT is used in the pre-built OEM industry, and is referred to as "the Vender's Rootkit." put simply, the script that makes Windows copy data from the BIOS to the System32 folder on the machine and execute it during Windows startup - every single time the system is booted, this binary is a native, user-mode application that is executed by the Windows Session Manager during operating system initialization. Which means "before all other programs, with administrative privileges". This gives pretty much full control over everything, including protected folders and the registry.

Deleting the files (and/or the service) simply restores them at the next reboot.

Clicking "cancel" in the first instance of the pop-up doesn't end the service, which keeps running in the background until you manually disable it (and it comes back at next reboot).

The only way you can ensure the files stay deleted is by disabling the "ASUS Armoury Crate" option in the UEFI setup program, which disables the ACPI-WPBT table.

By default, the ASUS UEFI setup program has the download and install Armoury Crate app option enabled.

Enter BIOS and disable Armoury Crate app before performing new clean Windows 10 install.

[VGAglory]

I did suspect I may have to do a clean install. Another quick question. Asus Armoury always boots up with my motherboard/lightigon one static color if I select another Effect type like Rainbow or Color Cycle, until Windows 10 is fully booted up and then it reverts to applied Color Effect? Is this normal? I am so dissapointed with Asus Armory lol.

[tinmann840]

I tried to install Armoury crate and halfway through the installation I got a blue screen error. The we're gathering information and your pc will restart error. After the restart when I finally get back to desktop the software is still there stuck half way though the install and another crash/restart. After one more of these events I re-installed windows. Before I was using Aura on this RE6 with no crashes I added 7 Corsair QL120 fans and iCUE now they have Armoury Crate instead of just Aura and it's not playing nice together.

[KingRamze]

I just ran the latest Armoury Crate update - it stalled about halfway through (or at least I think it did). Both my monitors went black. I let them sit for a bit in case it was a driver update & they'd reset. A few hours later - no change. No monitor input. Rebooted, couldn't even get to a windows login.

Managed to get to a restore point within WinRE environment to roll back to before the install, but even then, both monitors went black after a few minutes.

I took advantage of the reboot to install the latest BIOS, was able to get back into windows, but took a long time to get a login prompt & upon entering windows, a half dozen errors on screen related to ASUS software - AI, etc.

Can't even directly go into settings. Windows is basically corrupted b/c of the missing registration and hooks from the software. I have to work around through the old windows control panel to see the old installs of ASUS software (older Armoury crate lite service & aura lighting effect add-on x64)-- which I cannot remove because windows tells me the windows installer is not correctly installed and to contact my support personnel for assistance.

So, I apparently can't roll back to before the update cleanly -- I am going to try the Armoury Crate uninstaller tool first. If that doesn't work for me, I'll try various restore points, new chipset updates, and older Armoury crate versions until I get a stable system. Someone really needs to review the code for the 3.0.11.0 Armoury Crate. I was perfectly fine on the previous one I downloaded back in Nov 19th, 2020.

[KingRamze]

Armoury Crate removal tool told me it was unsuccessful and requested a reboot. Did this multiple times and made sure to run it as administrator upon each reboot. On the 3rd try, it told me it was successful. The next boot, there were fewer errors, but these still remain:

C:\Program Files\ASUSTeKcomputer.Inc\Sonic Suite 3\Foundation\SS3Svc32.exe

Class not registered

C:\Program Files (x86)\ASUS\AI Suite III\File Transfer\Wi-Fi GO! AssistTool\File Transfer
Server.exe

Class not registered.

Also still cannot open Windows settings directly or open a PNG image using the default windows file viewer (get an error).

Going to try re-installing the Sonic Suite 3 and AI Suite III if possible to see if that resolves things.

[KingRamze]

Appears I can't install said apps individually - can't find the Sonic 3 installer, and the AI installer says class not registered when I try to run it.

Additionally, I now have more errors:

Dipawaymode - No such interface supported, ProgD: "adkexCom.axdata"

Aisuite3 - No such interface supported, ProgID: "adkexCom.axdata"

Seriously, Armoury Crate made my machine unusable, and even a restore and armoury crate cleaner made it barely usable with tons of errors - and no way to cleanly uninstall anything or repair anything as I can see. I'm going to attempt to install JUST the Armoury Crate again using the older 3.0.9.0 installer (which I assume is just downloading the same as the newer one since it asks for an internet connection, but install only Armoury Crate. Last time, I attempted to install both Armoury Crate and Aura Creator on the option menu, so maybe just the Armoury Crate portion will run ok... and maybe fix some of these errors.

[KingRamze]

Can't run the Armoury Crate setup - tells me I don't have internet access even though I do.

also, can't install the latest AMD chipset - my system tells me it can't find a file that is clearly there.

Windows is basically too corrupt to do much. Might try manually deleting ASUS software, editing what starts on boot and registry files, but it's looking like unless ASUS has a real fix, I'm going to end up doing a complete re-install.