Severe System Freezes After Windows 11 Update

[tonyadams]

Hi everyone, I’m new to this forum and decided to join after exhausting most of the usual troubleshooting Slope Game channels, so I’m hoping someone here might have deeper insight: ever since my system automatically applied the latest cumulative Windows 11 update (KB5039302, I believe), I’ve been encountering sporadic yet progressively worsening system freezes - not the kind that gradually slow things down, but full UI lockups where even the cursor halts mid-motion, and no keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Alt+Del, Win+Ctrl+Shift+B) respond, forcing me to do a hard shutdown each time. It seems to occur more frequently when launching apps that rely on hardware acceleration (e.g., video conferencing tools or Chromium-based browsers), which led me to suspect a GPU driver conflict; however, rolling back to previous drivers and disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome didn’t resolve it. Event Viewer doesn’t show anything definitive - just generic “unexpected shutdown” logs - and all system health checks (SFC, DISM, memory diagnostics) pass without issue. It’s not thermal, as CPU and GPU temps remain well within normal under load. At this point, I’m wondering whether this might be a deeper kernel-level incompatibility introduced by the update, or possibly tied to firmware/BIOS interaction. Has anyone else run into this or discovered a workaround that doesn’t involve nuking the system with a rollback or clean install?