When Armoury Crate crashes Windows. A deep dive into ACSEControllerEmulator

Problem

I have been struggling to install Armoury Crate for roughly four months. Every installation attempt resulted in a system crash. I repeatedly used the official ASUS Armoury Crate uninstall tool, which only succeeded when run in Safe Mode. According to ASUS, this tool should remove all Armoury Crate related components, but that clearly was not the case. Each new installation attempt ended in another Blue Screen of Death.

During the crashes, Windows consistently reported one of the following system files:

• Driver or module in which error occurred: Wdf01000.sys (Wdf01000+0xCC60)
  File path: Wdf01000.sys
  Description: Kernel Mode Driver Framework Runtime

or

• Driver or module in which error occurred: ACSEHIDRemap.sys (ACSEHIDRemap+0xA9BE)
  File path: ACSEHIDRemap.sys

Both crashes occurred during the Armoury Crate installation process.

Troubleshooting

I am using a ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero motherboard, so the steps below are specific to this platform.

I first used the official Armoury Crate uninstall tool, available here:
https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-crosshair/rog-crosshair-viii-dark-hero-model/helpdesk_download/?model2name=rog%20crosshair%20viii%20dark%20hero

Try uninstalling Armoury Crate in normal Windows mode first. If that fails, reboot into Safe Mode and run the tool again.

After that, I rebooted the system and removed all remaining ASUS related software using the following tool:
https://github.com/codecrafting-io/asus-setup-tool

Read the instructions on the Codecrafting GitHub page carefully. The tool allows you to select which ASUS components to remove. I chose to remove everything.

Analyzing the crash

Both Wdf01000.sys and ACSEHIDRemap.sys are related to HID, Human Interface Devices. In every single crash, the system failed at the exact moment Armoury Crate attempted to install the Xbox Controller Emulator component, which is also HID related.

Armoury Crate downloads multiple software packages and installs them automatically. I discovered that these packages are temporarily stored in the following folder:

C:\Program Files\ASUS\ACOnePackageTemp\

This folder contains one or more ZIP files that hold the downloaded components. One of these files is named ACSEControllerEmulator.zip, which indeed contains the Xbox Controller Emulator installer.

I extracted this ZIP file and tried to install the Xbox Controller Emulator manually. This resulted in the same Blue Screen of Death, confirming that this specific component was the root cause of the crashes.

Solution

My first attempt was to modify ACSEControllerEmulator.zip inside the ACOnePackageTemp folder. I extracted the ZIP file, renamed the executable installer, and repacked it. However, when running the Armoury Crate installer again, I noticed that the ZIP file was restored with the original executable intact.

This indicated that Armoury Crate keeps a full, untouched copy of all downloaded packages elsewhere on the system. That location turned out to be:

C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\B9ECED6F.ArmouryCrate_6.3.9.0_x64__qmba6cd70vzyy\OnePackage

This is a protected system folder owned by TrustedInstaller. To modify its contents, you need to temporarily take ownership. Open a Command Prompt with Administrator privileges and run the following commands:

takeown /f "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\B9ECED6F.ArmouryCrate_6.3.9.0_x64__qmba6cd70vzyy\OnePackage" /r /d y
icacls "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\B9ECED6F.ArmouryCrate_6.3.9.0_x64__qmba6cd70vzyy\OnePackage" /grant Administrators:F /t

Once you have access, delete the following file:

del ACSEControllerEmulator.zip