Recently I started getting hit by access violations with weird stacks:

It seems an exception is thrown early in the life of some thread, during the initialization routine of rxinput.dll – a dll I never heard of. Naïve googling taught me pretty much nothing (except this dll already caused at least one more headache).

The dll location on disk was Program Files\NVIDIA corporation\NvStreamSvr, which gave a lead for some finer grained googling: it turns out this is part of a 2013 nVidia project called SHIELD, intended to stream games from a PC to other screens within Wi-Fi range. Sounds interesting, never heard of that too.

The nVidia streamer is managed by a system service:

…and so can be shut down. That didn’t help – rxinput.dll somehow kept getting injected into my executable and crashing it down (I saw detoured.dll in the same folder as rxinput.dll – most probably some win32 API was already hooked. In hindsight perhaps a restart would have helped). After disabling the service I was able to rename or delete rxinput and the crashing stopped – but I had no way of telling what component was destabilized in the process.

What eventually did the trick was uninstalling nVidia’s GeForce Experience – which is not only unsolicited (probably was bundled with some GPU driver), but is also still in beta. The entire NvStreamSvr folder is now gone, along with NVIDIA Streamer and Update Daemon services and my executable crashes.

Hope this saves someone out there some trouble.