A recent update to Dell's pre-installed SupportAssist Remediation software is causing persistent blue screen of death errors and reboot loops on multiple Dell laptop models, according to user reports on Dell's community forum (spotted by Neowin).
The update, version 5.5.16.0 of Dell SupportAssist Remediation and the accompanying OS Recovery Plugin, was released on April 30th. Affected users report their PCs crash and reboot roughly every 30 minutes, with the cycle continuing indefinitely until the software is removed.
SupportAssist Remediation is a background service that Dell bundles on its Windows PCs to automate system recovery and repair tasks. Dell hasn’t acknowledged the issue or released a fix, but the problem has been confirmed across at least two Dell product lines so far: the XPS 15 9530 and the Dell Pro Plus 14.
Multiple users have independently analyzed their Windows crash dump files using WinDbg, Microsoft's debugging tool, and arrived at the same conclusion: The crash dumps show a bugcheck code of 0xEF (CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED), with the faulting process identified as DellSupportAssistRemedationService.exe, part of the SupportAssist Remediation package installed at C:\Program Files\Dell\SARemediation\agent\.
This isn’t the first time that SupportAssist Remediation has caused similar crashes. A Dell forum thread from January last year described the same BSOD pattern on both Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines after a SupportAssist Remediation update, with WinDbg analysis again identifying the Dell software as the cause. That earlier thread went unresolved by Dell support.
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