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asupio.sys BSOD's with Driver Verifier on Three Separate Systems

Tech_Geek
Level 7
Well I did a quick search here and it seems like someone reported the same sort of thing quite awhile ago. Not a single reply.

I am going to quote the info I put on Tom's Hardware Forums cautioning users who use Ai Suite:

I am starting this thread not to get an answer but to hopefully steer people clear of the issues I've dealt with.

First off, I'm not new to the scene, I've been building computers since the PIII days (1999). I am usually pretty cynical and somewhat a skeptic. So when in comes to utilities that come with a motherboard, in general, I steer clear of them. I like monitoring software, but in my experience third party software (Everest, HWInfo, etc) are better than what the manufacturers supply. I have found that the software supplied by the manufacturers are buggy, inaccurate and just play fuggly. Presently I use HWInfo with the HWInfo gadget.

That all said, when I built my new system at the beginning of 2014 (and my son's), I decided to use Ai Suite III. Not for overclocking, or monitoring, but for the advanced fan features (Fan Expert) to control the fan curves. Now kudo's to ASUS for this feature, you get pretty fine grained control over how the fans work, pretty much like you'd have in Precision X or Afterburner for your graphics card.

Now for my experience and why I initiated this thread. From the time of the build I have suspected the occasional and random BSOD's I was getting were related to Ai Suite. I couldn't prove it since no driver was explicitly pointed out in the dump files. The BSOD was consistently a Kernel Security BSOD. I was also seeing errors in the Event Viewer saying that DipAwayMode.exe had stopped. This executable is tied to the power features of Ai Suite. This continued to happen even with the power settings set to High Performance and Away mode disabled. I put up with these since they happened very infrequently. Though for someone as anal as me, they were very annoying.

So here a couple of days ago, I got tired of it. So I started troubleshooting it using Driver Verifier. For those not familiar with this, it's a Windows utility to test drivers. I'm not about to give a tutorial for those not familiar with it, but if you Google it, you'll find plenty of information on it. It's primary use is to test drivers by stressing your system in different ways to see if your driver(s) misbehave. Anyway, as I said I used Driver Verifier. Since I'm using Windows 8.1, I had to restore the boot menu functionality that's been crippled in Windows 8.1 so that I could get to Safe Mode using F8. After doing this I started verifier. After rebooting, I had my BSOD within 30 seconds of logging in. Now I had the culprit and his name was asupio.sys. This is the hardware monitoring driver of Ai Suite (all versions of it as far as I know). I boot into Safe Mode and disabled Driver Verifier (because if you don't, you'll keep getting the BSOD and reboot cycle) and reboot into Normal mode.

Now as I've mentioned, I was already suspicious of this software, and had done some research in the past (primarily for the aforementioned DipAwayMode.exe stopping issue) and I remembered having found an ASUS support thread with an ASUS support person who advised the use of a "cleaning" file to remove the remnants of Ai Suite once Ai Suite has been uninstalled. I Googled it and found the thread again and downloaded the file. Then I started to uninstall Ai Suite and boom in the middle of it I got the dreaded BSOD. I won't go into lots of detail, but upon reboot I couldn't finish the uninstall, nor would it let me re-install it and the "cleaning" file I downloaded won't work until the software has been uninstalled successfully. I ended up having to use a third party (IObituninstaller) to force remove the software. Then to be safe I re-installed and uninstalled Ai Suite so it was removed correctly. With this done I used the "cleaning" file. Then to be sure I was good, I started Driver Verifier again and let it run for two days. Needless to say I didn't get another BSOD while Driver Verifier was running.

Now as I said, my son's computer also had this software installed. I tested his system in the same manner as I've mentioned above and got the same result. Uninstalled Ai Suite III and everything was good. Well not everything, he has a Razer keyboard and I found a driver for the overlay that causes BSOD'ing in Driver Verifier, but that is for another day.

Then I remembered that my daughters computer also runs Ai Suite II (not III), tested it, and same driver fails under the same conditions. Needless to say removal of the software allowed Driver Verifier to run without causing a BSOD.

So this has been a very long story to let the community know that I should have stuck with my gut and not installed any utility that comes with a motherboard. Hopefully my experience and sharing of that experience will help someone else from going through the same thing.

What is very surprising is that ASUS doesn't test this software better. ASUS makes first rate hardware. So it seems odd that they would shackle it with software that's unstable. For most less savvy users this would result in them thinking that the motherboard was faulty and tarnish ASUS' reputation. If it had been just my computer and not my son's and daughter's (with an earlier version), I could have said that some other software on my computer was conflicting with it. However three computers which are essentially three separate ecosystems with the same issue with the same file making it pretty self explanatory.


So to paraphrase this info, I had two systems running Ai Suite III and one running Ai Suite II. All three systems are running Windows 8.1 X64. All three BSOD pointing to asupio.sys when Driver Verifier is run. The version of Ai Suite III is 1.00.56 which is the latest listed for my and my son's motherboards. My daughters system ran Ai Suite II. I know I'm not the only one who has had this problem as I've found a few forum threads here mentioning the same thing. Anyone else seeing this? Or is willing to test there installation with Driver Verifier to confirm my findings?
9,749 Views
7 REPLIES 7

Clintlgm
Level 14
Well I guess I won't use Driver Verifier I have been running the AI III programs for a few months now with no issue on a Z97 pro board. I Have not experienced a BSOD since I built this unit back in Feb 2015
As you noted I also just installed it to use the fan expert and EPU.
G752VY-DH72 Win 10 Pro
512 GB M.2 Samsung 960 Pro
1 TB Samsung 850 pro 2.5 format
980m GTX 4 GB
32GB DDR 4 Standard RAM

Z97 PRO WiFi I7 4790K
Windows 10 Pro
Z97 -A
Windows 10 Pro

Clintlgm wrote:
Well I guess I won't use Driver Verifier I have been running the AI III programs for a few months now with no issue on a Z97 pro board. I Have not experienced a BSOD since I built this unit back in Feb 2015
As you noted I also just installed it to use the fan expert and EPU.

Hello

Same here. No issues on several Z97 boards and X99 as well. Win8.1 and 10.

Good to hear there are no issue with win 10 so far!
G752VY-DH72 Win 10 Pro
512 GB M.2 Samsung 960 Pro
1 TB Samsung 850 pro 2.5 format
980m GTX 4 GB
32GB DDR 4 Standard RAM

Z97 PRO WiFi I7 4790K
Windows 10 Pro
Z97 -A
Windows 10 Pro

Would you mind looking in your reliability report and see if you have DipAwayMode,exe stopped errors?

Yes top row are all dipaway stops
I haven't really noticed this at all except for the lock ups in IE 11 and never has a BSOD or Screen Freeze


49679
G752VY-DH72 Win 10 Pro
512 GB M.2 Samsung 960 Pro
1 TB Samsung 850 pro 2.5 format
980m GTX 4 GB
32GB DDR 4 Standard RAM

Z97 PRO WiFi I7 4790K
Windows 10 Pro
Z97 -A
Windows 10 Pro

I found this http://processchecker.com/file/DipAwayMode.exe.html
G752VY-DH72 Win 10 Pro
512 GB M.2 Samsung 960 Pro
1 TB Samsung 850 pro 2.5 format
980m GTX 4 GB
32GB DDR 4 Standard RAM

Z97 PRO WiFi I7 4790K
Windows 10 Pro
Z97 -A
Windows 10 Pro

TimRex
Level 7
Thank you for posting this. I just today had preciesly this issue after upgrading to firmware 1501.
I'm a little surprised that the bios upgrade alone would trigger this issue now, but then - I've never run Driver Verification mode before, so perhaps it was just lurking until now.

In short... AI Suite 3 can get in the bin.
https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?126303-ROG-Strix-z270g-firmware-1501-AsUpIo-sys-BSOD&p=846...