Yet another sky go stuck on blue screen (with a twist)

[chaplic]

I have an issue where  sky go just hangs on a blue screen, as reported by many in here. My day invovles fixing software and the like so this is sort-of my thing, so I've done a bit more in depth analysis of what it does and what's wrong . sadly no fix but may inspire others or even have a 3rd line person look at it...

So, PC itself is running windows 11 and pretty much no other software other than Office. No exotic security just MS Defender.  It is Azure AD joined but no meaningful policies are applied. A remote control app called DWService is installed, although the problem presents when it's uninstalled too. citrix is not installed.

To get the basics out of the way; the problem perists after an uninstall, deleting the files out of appdata, running as admin. I also created a new user account with the same issue. Internet is bog standard sky broadband with nothing funky.

So I delved a bit fruther to understand what makes it tick...

On startup it reaches out to the web OK, I'm guessing this is the 'checking for updates' bit as it connects to a CDN

When the sky go is sitting at the blue screen it doesnt seem to be doing much unless I click around the blue screen.

Here we can see the app loads two child processes but what was intersting to me is that its' aware of the type of video card/ driver I have. I changed out the driver to the MS Basic Display driver and the arguments are different, but the problem persists. I went back to the proper driver and updated it, no joy. Why is the software so interested in GPU drivers and "workarounds"?

I get a sense the blue screen is trying to show a cookie consent window. I  noticed powershell is invoked during the startup of the app, so I setup powershell script logging to see what it does.

What what I can gather the powershell looks at various components of the machine, smbios information. It also loads windows forms modules (to show a GUI) so I'm guessing that's the cookie prompt. I was able to use the same powershell winforms module to generate a 'hello world' window so there's nothing intrinsicly wrong with the machine.

There is no restrictions on powershell on the machine (though it's invoked with executionmode bypass anyway). I also upgraded powershell to the latest version.

What is interesting is that it calllls a powershell module PSReadLine which looks like a basic module to get input from something, but powershell is erroring that the requested method isnt appropriate.

The code passes

host. runspace as a System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.LocalRunspace
executioncontext as System.Management.Automation.EngineIntrinsics

It might be a spurious error. However it's a little odd given it looks like its trying to throw up a UI via powershell (or is the PsReadLine expecting a 'OK' click from cookie consent?). I dont know what the return value is supposed to be, I had a play with modifying the module to return $true and so on with no joy. 

So questions

1) Why does the app care about the video driver so much and what are these 'workarounds'. The whole point of a driver is to abstract the app from the OS. In any case, since for some reason it's tied to video cards, can we have a list of 'not working' and 'working' video cards, please?

2) Why is the powershell throwing the error above? Is the cookie consent page driven by a webUI?

[chaplic]

Update from me: I emailed a sky apps email address I saw on this forum pretty much the same information as above. Each response has been pathetic and just following a script (I have asked for to be refered to a 2nd line tech). I then had a phone call where I was passed around three agents cuminating in being asked to check the lights on the broadband router were on. Said agent was unable to read emails sent in and asked for a video session (but seeing as I'm not at home working to pay the huge sky bill thats not possible).

Working in this field I accept that 90% of customer enquiries can be dealt with via simple steps at first line, but you must have a route to escalate, to devs if required, if not.

[chaplic]

Feels like I'm screaming into the void at this point but I'll update here  in case some other nerd is having the same issues

I thought the powershell error I saw when logging might have been a root cause, but on a second PC (exactly the same make/ model/ build!) it shows the cookie consent screen but also still logs lots of errors about he readline command.. So that doesnt take me much forward other than we know there's some shonky powershell coding but it's not stopping the cookie consent screen from popping, as we see here. I'm not sure where to go from here, I will do a bit more tracing on the working machine and compare. 

[chaplic]

Screaming more into the void, I had concluded that I'd need to figure it outmyself.... I've been busy doing other things. Fired it up today, got the cookie prompt, accepted, signed in... all works!

Nothing changed client side. I'd love to think there's a silent engineer scouring these forums fixing bugs but someone I suspect I just got lucky...

[chaplic]

Forgot to add, I noticed the non-working machine did not have  Appdata\LocalLow\Synamedia folder with some sky related stuff in it. I copied this from a working machine but no joy, until 2 weeks later it works.