Dell PCs are running into constant BSOD reboot loops and Windows 11 isn't the culprit

We are all familiar with Windows 11 updates, which bug out and lead to various issues, ones that probably anger users the most are when they find themselves greeted with a BitLocker recovery screen or when the system keeps rebooting or blue-screening.

While it is easy and tempting to quickly point fingers at Microsoft, given its track record (although this is said to be changing soon for the better), the tech giant is likely not always responsible for such issues.

One such bug has popped up on Dell systems wherein affected users are finding themselves faced with a PC that constantly reboots after hitting a blue screen of death (BSOD). The problem has been experienced by several people including one of Neowin's long-time forum members, polo69, who says they have been hitting BSODs every 30 mins or so after a new Dell software update.

Here's what the event log looks like (image below). As you can see, there are critical errors that led to kernel power outage and blue screened simultaneously after with a "CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED" message with error codes like 0x000000EF.

A smart user, MartinHBS2026, dug into these issues using WinDbg and managed to figure out that the problem is being caused by Dell's own SupportAssist software. For anyone who may not know, WinDbg is a Windows debugging tool that allows users to analyze such error dumps. The user wrote: "Analysing the minidump with Windbg, we can see that SupportAssist is causing this! i srated to uninstall support assist than eit[sic] carshed again.. then i uninstalled eveyting[sic] related to support assist: (remediation and OS recovery plugin)."

Hence the simple solution could be to uninstall the SupportAssist from your system if you are affected by this bug.

Ironically, it seems this is not the first time Dell's SupportAssist update had led to this issue as a very similar thing happened back in December 2024 as well. Thankfully for that update, the users succeeded in finding a solution. What worked back then was running the "SupportAssist Scan hardware" which, once complete, did not lead to any consequent crashes or BSODs. Hence this could also be worth a try.

Dell has not yet responded to these reports, though the likely explanation probably has to do with it being the weekend and hence the support team as well is not available.

Source: Dell forum (link1, link2, link3)

Thanks for tip, polo69 !!!