I know most replies here will likely encourage Linux and I get it. If it were up to me it’d be done. The problem is I work from home and are bound to certain limitations.

So to the problem at hand, I hope to get some insight on:

The two culprits are bitlocker and Window’s gaming service/overlay not sure what actual name of it is without having the error message in front of me. I’m not nearly as irritated at the gaming issue as I am with the bitlocker issue because the bitlocker is causing random crashes forcing PC reboots.

Where I find my hands tied is for both scenarios, I have gone thru Windows Services, Gpedit, regedit, and admin powershell command inputs that all show have successfully terminated the bitlocker and gamepad functions from even being able to be initiated.

As for bitlocker specifically, I have never enabled, used, activated or even owned a version of Windows 11 that provided access to bitlocker services.

I didn’t know it even existed before the Windows 11 24h2 update. Neither issue was present before the update. Even went thru the steps back stepping the updates installed to before the 24h2 update.

So by all intensive purposes (lol) the PC is running on a Windows build before the update fucked it up, is running without any group permission, active services, or regestry settings that should allow bitlocker or gamebar to launch.

Yet here I am. Everytime I launch a game I have a popup that informs me there are no available apps to open the gamebar.

As well as almost every other day no matter what I’m doing or what I am in the middle of, my PC just shuts down and reboots out of fuckin nowhere.

When I check the event viewer, the “critical” error message just says “The system rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power suddenly.”

The two warning error messages that occur almost in conjunction to the reboot critical message are two identical error messages that state, “Bitlocker timed out attempting to enumerate bands during volume discovery on this hardware encrypting drive.”

Before i get to my questions, I would like to add I am also entirely exhausted of reaching out to microsoft for help. They are fucking useless and each ticket I’ve opened with them results in a redundant cycle that ends nowhere at the cost of hrs of my time sitting on hold or following their recommended troubleshooting suggestions that are just redundant to the previous attempts to help.

My specific questions are as follows:

1.0 Everything I google regarding bitlocker just returns bugs people experiencing from when the are trying to get bitlocker to work properly and not much for scenarios that want it removed completely from a system. Does anyone know of any recommened resources I can do some more learning on the matter?

2.0 Am I wrong to think that turning off, disabling and removing the means for these operations to launch/initiate/run in the background will also prevent the system from attempting to initiate those operations?

3.1 Potential work around I thought to try, any feedback is appreciated, if either of those event viewer error messages are actually telling me that I must install a bitlocker driver for the service to properly launch and the issue will work itself out.

3.2 The fallback plan is to reboot my approach completely and convert Windows 11 back to Windows 10. Have never done this extreme of a fix so any feedback is gratefully recieved. Does anyone have any goto resources for this procedure to help me keep from anything falling thru the cracks.

4.0 Last couple notes if it helps, another bug that I noticed but fixed is my one screen’s taskbar does this wierd shit where the whole thing gets super fucking tiny and just floats in the middle of the lower screen. The issue only stopped when I reinstalled the back ported Windows 11 24h1 version or whatever it’s called. Since being under the previous update version the taskbar glitch has gone away. Went thru 3 hrs of troubleshooting with Microsoft for this one and despite their most urgent attempts to prove otherwise, we came to the conclusion it was not the hardware, monitors or gou driver. It only happened to whatever monitor was assigned by the system to be considered monitor “1.”

Nothing here is life or death so I’m not overly worried but at the same time I’d love to get some insight into either end of this shitshow but to reiterate, fixing the bitlocker shit is enemy of the state numero uno.

Any and all input to follow will be so appreciated. Thank you to anyone in advance who made it this far thru this rant and replies. To them especially but also to anyone else that pops in, I’d also like to wish you all a wonderful fucking holiday season!