14 DAY TRIAL // We’re seeing an increasing number of reports pointing to BSODs experienced after upgrading Windows 10 devices to April 2018 Update (version 1803), and one of the most common stop codes appears to be CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED.
Judging from user reports online, the said BSOD happens on a wide variety of hardware configurations and the error appears to be triggered by different tasks, like launching apps, such as Skype, browsing the web, playing games, or watching videos.
At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a specific pattern that would help reproduce the bug, but some users on reddit speculate that the BSOD might be caused by the GPU. Some believe it’s a driver compatibility issue, though by the looks of things, reinstalling the drivers doesn’t make any difference.
Many of the reports, however, concern Acer devices, and there’s a chance that a driver bug is indeed causing the BSOD. Neither Acer nor Microsoft acknowledged the problems and provided workarounds for users whose devices are impacted by this problem.
A search on Google points to various fixes for the CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED BSOD, including the typical solutions coming down to booting to safe mode, performing a clean boot, and scanning the drives for potential errors. Again, no difference is being made by doing these.
The rollback
The only effective way to avoid getting the BSOD is to temporarily roll back to the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update until Microsoft fixes these issues.
The April 2018 Update is currently available as a manual download only, and this means that bugs like these are likely to be experienced.
Microsoft is projected to release Windows 10 April 2018 Update fixes next week on Patch Tuesday, the same day when security updates would be published as well. A cumulative update addressing the most common bugs will certainly be shipped.