There's definitely something wrong in the area of the USB devices. The joystick (just a Thrustmaster Hotas 4) frequently just stops working. Originally it was so bad (and not just the joystick but also the Track IR device) that I followed some online advice about manually uninstalling all the USB 3.0 drivers in order to get Windows to reinstall the latest drivers (a process which stupidly left me with no working keyboard or mouse for a while and a complete panic that I'd killed my new PC before I'd even started). Luckily I did get the drivers back again. It's still not right tho. I had to reboot twice this morning when my joystick just stopped working mid session. The single most reproducible symptom of this is that if I start the Windows "Setup USB game controllers" dialog, the window with the list of controllers opens but is then immediately unresponsive and typically remains that way for several minutes after which my joystick then works. I also have a problem with my HP printer (again USB connected) which, although it prints, pops up a dialog as it's doing so saying it can't communicate with the printer. The PC also feels quite slow to boot and I can't help wondering if it's the same issue ... some kind of timeout while it tries to talk to unresponsive USB devices during startup? At the weekend I'm going to transfer a 4xUSB3.0 PCIe card from my old PC - a) to give me some leg room re: spare slots and b) to spread my USB load across more controllers (that's a thing right?) in the hope of fixing this situation. It will be an old card tho. Does that matter? Are there good and bad PCIe USB cards, can I get something more modern that's likely to be more reliable? Are there USB diagnostics I can run? I guess I'll be talking to PC Specialist about all this too.
Jesus ... what an absolute flippin' nightmare this has been!
So my usb/joystick problems persisted and another symptom (one of many) was that EDCoPilot was taking about 5 minutes to startup, about 5 times longer than usual! I worked with Razzafrag (EDCoPilot's developer) and established that the call to initialise the text to speech library was taking nearly a minute on my PC rather than the half second he was seeing ... over 100 times slower! There were other things too. If I tried to type in Discord while EDCoPilot was starting up I was getting about 1 keystroke every 2 seconds!
I did install another PCIe USB card from my old PC but, although it gave me some spare USB slots, it didn't make any difference to the main issue above regardless of what I plugged in where (and I tried numerous arrangements).
I had an hour long remote assistance call with PC Specialist. They were excellent, spent quite a while examining my event logs, and ran all sort of Windows system integrity checks on the PC, sadly to no avail. They left me with an email containing a bunch of things to run in safe mode (which they couldn't do remotely) and asked me to call back for another session if the problem persisted.
I went back to Windows Defender (both Razzafrag and I agreed it felt like anti-virus software getting in the way of things). I tried turning off every feature one by one and then using EDCoPilot startup as a test for whether the problem had gone away. I added exceptions for EDCoPilot. Nothing helped. In desperation I even turned off Windows new "Smart App Control" which was in "Evaluation" mode. It was a last resort because it can't be turned back on without doing a fresh install of Windows 11! It didn't help (and no, I won't be re-installing Windows 11 to turn it back on again).
It was at this point (yesterday afternoon) while watching the task manager process list as I did things like trying to run that Windows USB game controller dialog that I noticed a thing called "AAC MB HAL" popping up occasionally. I dismissed it initially assuming it was just one of those mysterious background system tasks to do with "AAC" audio encoding but then I googled it.
It's technically legitimate software supplied with Asus products like my motherboard to manage driver updates, fan control, RGB lighting, etc. Anyway, I had a quick look, decided I didn't need it and uninstalled it.
It seems
like that has fixed all my problems !!!
The USB game controller dialog opens instantly.
My PC can communicate with the printer properly.
EDCoPilot starts up in under 50 seconds.
And last night I was able to join the Elite Racers for some canyon racing and the system (joystick, headtracker and all) ran flawlessly for over 2 hours.
Thanks Asus, your hardware might be excellent but your software blows goats and made my life a living hell.
...