The spam came from inside the house: How a smart TV can choke a Windows PC

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses how a Hisense smart TV can cause issues with a connected Windows PC, including disappearing settings, keyboard problems, remote desktop issues, and taskbar problems. The root cause is identified as the TV generating random UUIDs for UPNP network discovery, which Windows then adds to its Device Association Framework, leading to various system problems.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Hisense TV and Windows PC issues

1. What kind of issues did the Hisense TV cause on the Windows PC?

• Disappearing display settings
• MIDI keyboard interface stopped working
• Task manager would hang until force-closed
• Video capture cards had trouble connecting
• Taskbars on the PC disappeared and the PC refused to launch any settings panels

2. What was the root cause of these issues? The Hisense TV was generating random UUIDs for UPNP network discovery every few minutes, and Windows was adding these alternate Hisense devices to its Device Association Framework, which caused issues with Task Manager, Bluetooth, Settings apps, File Explorer, and more.

3. How did the user fix the issues? The user deleted hundreds of registry keys related to the Hisense TV's UUIDs, and also disabled the "Set up network connected devices automatically" setting in Windows. This resolved the various problems on the Windows PC.

[02] Hisense TV recommendations

1. What did the user recommend regarding the Hisense TV? The user recommended not buying the Hisense 50Q8G TV, or at least not having it on the same network as the Windows PC.