We’ve been digging into a frustrating and elusive bug. When your computer goes into hibernation while LaunchBox or Big Box is open, and then wakes up, you might get a message that says you're out of memory. Shortly after, the app closes.

🔍 What’s actually happening?

After extensive research, we discovered that this is a systemic issue in .NET’s 3D engine, which powers both LaunchBox and Big Box. The problem seems to affect only Windows 11. Windows 10 is not affected.

Here’s the technical breakdown:

• The 3D engine is used for Big Box’s Wheels and the 3D Model viewer found in both applications.

• During hibernation, Windows offloads RAM contents to disk.

• When the system resumes, our application tries to access 3D elements that were in memory before hibernation.

• Because those resources are no longer where they were expected to be, .NET misinterprets this as a memory failure and crashes the program.

Hybrid Sleep is also affected, because it's essentially a two-part process: your system first enters a low-power sleep mode (where RAM is still held in memory), and then transitions to hibernation (where RAM is written to disk). If the system moves into the hibernation part of the process while LaunchBox or Big Box is still open with 3D content active, the same memory misalignment happens on resume, leading to the crash.

🛠️ What can we do about it?

Unfortunately, we’re limited here. This is an internal .NET bug that we can’t fix ourselves. We've seen other applications running into the same problem. We're closely watching for updates from Microsoft and will adopt a new .NET version as soon as a fix is available.

🧪 What have we done to try to address this?

While the issue is not 100% solved, we have created a workaround. Our software now tries to detect when your computer is preparing to hibernate. When possible, it quickly unloads 3D content before hibernation starts and reloads it after the system wakes up.

This workaround is effective in many cases. It works especially well in:

• Big Box Platform and Game views with Wheels.

• The Game Discovery Center.

We see less consistent success in:

• Hybrid Views.

• LaunchBox, where timing can be tighter.

The reason for this is that once hibernation begins, the system starts closing things rapidly. Our application doesn't always have time to complete the unload process before shutdown.

💡 What can you do?

If you're seeing this issue:

• In LaunchBox, you can disable 3D Models to avoid the crash:

  • Go to Tools > Options > Visuals > Game Details.

  • Uncheck "Show 3D Model".

• In Big Box, your options are more limited since the Wheel is a key part of the interface.

  • However, switching to a text-based view significantly reduces the chances of seeing this issue.

• You can also disable hibernation entirely on your computer. This will completely eliminate the issue. Unless you absolutely rely on hibernation, we recommend turning it off. There are many alternatives like Sleep or simply shutting down when needed. Hibernation is known to cause quirks and issues across the Windows operating system and many applications, and isn’t always reliable.

If you’ve never run into this bug, there’s no action needed.

We’ll continue to monitor the situation and will release an update as soon as a permanent fix becomes available through .NET.

Thanks for sticking with us!