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Focus Assist Crashes when wpnuserservice disabled or not available

Stan Kasper 1,376 Reputation points
2020-10-30T21:33:43.18+00:00

I was hoping to avoid the whole unistack svcgroup service. wpnuserservice being one of them.
But when you disable that service Focus Assist in Settings / System crashes. People have posted
about why Focus Assist crashes. This may be one vector along with the AV stuff. In any case
it is a nice hole for a security exploit.

Windows 10
Windows 10
A Microsoft operating system that runs on personal computers and tablets.
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  1. Jenny Feng 14,096 Reputation points
    2020-11-02T02:23:45.99+00:00

    @Stan Kasper
    Hi,

    Based on my research, the problem comes from Avast (or some other source) turning off the Windows Push Notifications User Service. Turning it on, restores Focus Assist functionality.
    Avast has something called Silent Mode, which many people use because Avast started pushing all these annoying messages lately
    In the Avast configuration (go to Menu , Settings, Components, scroll down the page until Performance, Do Not Disturb Mode, then Customize) there is a setting called "Silence notifications from 3rd-party apps". By default it's on. Turn it off and Avast will no longer kill the service.

    Hope above information can help you.

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  1. Stan Kasper 1,376 Reputation points
    2020-11-05T17:01:56.5+00:00

    Which is why I mentioned 'AV' in my 1st post. When I 1st researched this people said 'Avast' and did not mention that the real culprit was the service. If the service is not running and/or unable to start (disabled) then Focus Assist CRASHES and does not end gracefully. The issue with that is you can now inject a virus onto that system. I believe MS is looking into this as it has yet to be fixed across many versions of Windows 10.

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