Multiple PCs frozen right after update.

Question

Over the last couple weeks, since we received the Core Agent update to 2.19.8 on 10/4, we've had multiple older machines freeze completely. Screen freezes, no keyboard or mouse, NIC unresponsive. We have to do a hard shut down to bring them down and back up. Not positive that this update is the culprit, but on the computers that have been freezing 2 to 3 times a day, we uninstalled Sophos and they've been behaving for a couple days now. 
 Models affected: HP xw4400, HP xw4600, Z400. All have been running Win10 21H1 with last update back in September. "Newer" computers (e.g. Z420, Z4 G4) have not had this problem. Event logs show nothing out of the ordinary around the time of crash. 
 Just curious if anybody else has run into this in the last week.

Vman · Accepted Answer

Massive update from Sophos. I have been pushing Sophos support, manager & escalation. 
 Apparently they have made changes with the threat control policy and how they work. 
 Sophos have made this change today and all should start to work better now. with no client updates needed. 
 We are working past our freeze window of about 3 hours and almost into our 4th hour.

Sophos User930 · Answer

If anyone is still having the issue, I suspect the issue is with some form of memory scanning. 
 If you use Process Hacker to inspect the memory (memory tab) of the audiodg,exe process, regardless of Sophos being installed, when sound isn't being played through the sound card, the computer doesn't hang. If you run some audio through it, e.g. Windows Media Player, it will. 
 Likewise, if you try and create a complete dump of audiodg,exe from Process Explorer or even create a dump of audiodg.exe from Task Manager it will hang the computer when sound is being played. I think there must be a driver/hardware element to it. 
 On my Win11 and Win 10 laptop, I can use Task manager to dump audiodg.exe without issue, there is a short sound interruption while the process is suspended but it works. 
 There are no third party DLLs loaded into AudioDG.exe when this failure occurs either. 
 Maybe others can test dumping AudioDg.exe from Task Manager on machines that were and were not affected to see if one hangs and the other doesn't while sound is being played.

Multiple PCs frozen right after update.

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