Solved Intel AX211 Wi-Fi Controller Killer Intelligence Center Application (driver) crashes my system when in sleep

Hello all,

Recently my system started crashing while in sleep mode. First time it occured I thought I had mistakenly hit "Shutdown" instead of "sleep" but then it kept occuring. I would put my system to "sleep" with a bunch of windows on and browser open and in the morning system doesn't wake from sleep, instead it goes through the full booting sequence.

Looking at the reliability monitor I noticed that each time Windows crashed, this Killer process also crashed at the same time.

This killer process is my Wifi's card driver Intel BE200/AX211 Wi-Fi Controller Driver and Killer Intelligence Center Application | Driver Details | Dell Australia

Going through a few days I can see that the killer process "stops working" every 2-3 days. However when it crashes when Windows is running it doesn't cause any issue, it crashes Windows only when it is in sleep.



When I installed the drivers for my Wifi card, it installed with it this Killer Intelligence Center Application. I never understood this application, user interface is 320p and completely glitchy. In the startup apps i togged off Killer so it doesn't launch automatically each time I boot Windows but it kept starting automatically. It would not show an icon in the system tray neither in the task bar but somehow the windows would be there in the task view (sliding 3 fingers up on the trackpad). It just looked like a dodgy app.

So I decided to delete it through Settings > Apps > Installed apps it doesn't seem the application was correctly deleted. The application window no longer start up upon launch but the processes are still running in the background as illustrated below.

Task manager:


Then when I right click one the processes and open file locations it takes me there



What would be the best way to proceed from here?
How can I completely remove these Killer associated files/processes from my system now that it no longer show in the Windows' App settings?
Would deleting my wifi's card drivers via Task Manager be a good idea?
How would I go to properly clean my registry and unsure it's gone from there too before attempting a reinstall of the drivers maybe?
Noting that my drivers and wifi card are functioning normally but I don't know if the killer app can separately removed from the drivers

Any insights would be appreciated

Thanks

PS: XPS 15 9520
Windows 11 23H2

Sephirote said:

Any insights would be appreciated

Click to expand...

I would also appreciate insight on these Killer apps, I regularly get "KillerNetworkService stopped working" in Reliability Monitor.

It's worth to be noted that in the pic you posted the DellCoreServices crashed first before the Killer application. If you have such software try to uninstall it first and then check if the Killer application still crashes.

trevo said:

I would also appreciate insight on these Killer apps, I regularly get "KillerNetworkService stopped working" in Reliability Monitor.

Click to expand...

It comes with your Wifi drivers and is supposed to be a Wifi optimizer software but is completely useless in practice.

I solved the issue.

Going off this Using Device Manager to Uninstall Devices and Driver Packages - Windows drivers

I noticed there were 2 separate drivers installed on my system. The actual drivers for my wifi card and drivers for the killer application.

To identify the killer driver use this command to list out all drivers in your driver store

pnputil /enum-drivers

Click to expand...

Here's how it looked like for me

Published Name: oem2.inf
Original Name: killernetworkcomponent.inf
Provider Name: Intel Corporation
Class Name: SoftwareComponent
Class GUID: {5c4c3332-344d-483c-8739-259e934c9cc8}
Driver Version: 12/05/2023 3.1523.1205.1
Signer Name: Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher

Click to expand...

As mentioned just above, I was able to identify 2 separate Wifi drivers, the real drivers that runs the wifi card (the one we don't want to delete) and the drivers for the killer component (as shown just above, this is the one that can be deleted)

Once you have identified the killer driver use this command to delete it

pnputil /delete-driver <Published Name> /uninstall

Click to expand...

(Replace <Published Name> in the command by the actual published name, for me it was oem2.inf)


After doing this, 1 process out of the 3 was gone



To finish the job and get rid of the 2 last killer processes this is how I proceeded:

- Go to Task Manager and then to the tab "Services"
- Type "killer" in the search box and should show up
- Right click on each process and hit"stop"
- Press Win + R and type services.msc to open the services window
- Find the killer service, double click each service to open its properties and in the startup type dropdown menu select disable



Restart and this did the trick for me, the killer processes are no longer running in task manager and no more "KillerNetworkService stopped working" in Reliability Monitor. It's only been 48 hours but my computer no longer crashes in sleep which was my main problem.



Hope that helps

Sephirote said:

Hope that helps

Click to expand...

Thanks very much for such a helpful post