Issue with WMR opening the desktop - "App Slate Closed. . ."

User Support Hub Virtual Reality (VR)
, ,
1

In the past month or so, I started having issues when in VR and popping up the desktop via the win key. I finally found the text the shows up since I couldn’t write it down or take a screen shot (only shows in the headset). Steps taken:

  1. Start flight, start VR.
  2. Press win key to pop up the “app slate” menu.
  3. Click “desktop” (which used to have zero problems)
  4. Now, about half the time I get this message: “The app slate closed because the current immersive app doesn’t support using an app slate with it. To use an app slate, return to your mixed reality home first”

Sometimes pressing the windows key again gets it to revert back to the sim, and then trying to open the desktop again works just fine. But other times it causes the VR view of the sim to go black and freeze. I was running OXRToolkit 1.24 but just installed the 1.32. Hopefully that fixes it, but in the meantime, has anyone else had this problem?

Win10
i9-9900k
3090
32GB ram
49% RAM usage with everything loaded.

2

I just started getting the same message in Elite dangerous, going on about a week, probably around the time Steam announced new Steam VR beta 2.0, I used to be able to “tab” into both Steam desktops, and WMR desktop, now I crash as soon as do either one.

3

Exactly. Seems like something recently triggered this. I know there was an update for Open XR for WMR in the app store, but that didn’t seem to help anything.

image

I’ll troubleshoot as I have time.

4

What I have done so far is

  1. pulled off all the unnecessary USB connections, no help,
  2. changed video cable, clean install of Nvidia drivers starting from few months back back to latest one
  3. Clean install of the game, cleaned registry etc.
  4. Been talking to Frontier Development for 5 days, they are also running out of ideas
  5. I used to have Quest 2 but use Reverb G2 so:
  1. Locate %localappdata%\openvr\openvrpaths.vrpath and open it in Notepad.
  2. Look in the “external drivers” sections look for multiple entries for “MixedRealityVRDriver”

JSONCopy

"external_drivers" : [
   "D:\\Steam\\steamapps\\common\\MixedRealityVRDriver",
   "E:\\Steam\\steamapps\\common\\MixedRealityVRDriver"
],
```3. If you see multiple entries, remove the older of the two entries. Once you have only one entry, there should no longer be a comma at the end of the line.

there's couple other things I've done, the best one so far, i.e. most progress was to lower Hz from 90 to 60, I know it's not a solution, but it seems something is hogging the VRAM  and not releasing it back to game resources.

6) open MSFS in non VR, minimize, open Task Manager go to details, right click on MSFS.exe change priority to HIGH, close and start again in VR, helped a little.

Let me know what you come up with, I'll do my stuff and we can compare.

Ryzen 7 5800x3d
32 GB Ram
3070ti
M.2 SSD 2TB
Reverb G2 using Display Port and USB-C
At the moment I use OpenXR with Open Composite, just to be able to play.
6

I did the ole nvidia cache dump (DX and OGL) and those had no effect. However, total oddity is I discovered that I can “control” when it freeze/crashes.

What I noticed:
0. In VR looking at virtual desktop with sim in non-VR mode, no problems.

  1. In cockpit, in VR, press the win key.
  2. If I’m fairly still and see that the background around the slate window with the desktop button turns black, I press win again to return to the VR cockpit.
  3. Look a little further (left since it’s more comfortable), then press win again
  4. If back ground behind the slate window shows the cockpit, then I press the desktop button and sure enough, the desktop slate pops up.

This go round I utterly bogged the sim down as much as possible, with FSLTL running, FS windowed, FSE Simconnect running, HW monitor running, MS edge running with a whole slew of tabs open, and the NLR HF8 software going. As long as I can see the cockpit in the background, it works. It only takes a second or two to see if it turns black or stays.

Hopefully that’s clear enough for you to try. . .
Not really a “fix” but at least avoiding the crash “steps.”

7

I’ll try and see if I can replicate that on mine… did you check you DxDiag just to see all the info on your machine, mine shoved that I was using older Nvidia drivers although the “experience” showed I was using newest, not that re-installing made any difference.

8

Definitely can cause it to kill the sim. . .

image
image837×545 18.7 KB

I’ll have to research what causes that fault.

9

I had the first 45 minutes of uninterrupted simulator time going back and forth to desktop, opening all the possible windows I could think of.

I turned on Windows 11 developer mode and activated openXR after that.

  1. Open Settings
  2. Click Privacy & security
  3. Find Developer Mode from the right panel
  4. Turn Developer Mode On
  5. Install open Xr
10

1/30/24: Just got another OpenXR update in the MS Store today. Now just bumping the win key freezes and crashes the sim. :frowning: I’ll see if I can troubleshoot. . .yet again.