WoW crashes/disconnects without releasing file locks

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1

For about two weeks now, I’ve been experiencing weird crashes/disconnects that caused WoW to not start properly anymore until I restart the PC entirely (logging out of Windows is not enough) which points to file locks not being released on crash, or possibly the other way around, the game cannot access files anymore and thus crashes/disconnects.

At first, this happened as a full crash about once every 2-3 days, the game closes to a Windows-level error message, sadly I did not take a screenshot or write it down.
After the crash, the BNet Launcher tried to update the game (presumably repairing/redownloading files that were “missing” or appeared empty as they couldn’t be read, but that got stuck on “Initializing…” and never continued.
Only a full PC restart helped, after which the Launcher did appear to do some short patching (possibly just redownloading/verifying files deemed corrupted earlier)

In the past couple days, this has shifted to more frequent random disconnects, at varying amounts of session lengths (shortest I recall was about half an hour) to this error https://i.imgur.com/wVhpYWQ.png on the login screen, always complaining about not being able to open WTF/SavedVariables/Blizzard_Console.lua
Attempting to reconnect sometimes brings up the character select, but on login throws more errors about various files not being accessible, often a character-specific SavedVariables file.
The Launcher does not appear to do anything after closing the client.

Trying to open these files manually either threw an error (code suggests disk issue) or showed them as full of Null characters, but they were accessible and intact after a restart, so I’m hoping it’s not a disk issue (new SSD, only 6 months old) but rather an issue of WoW.
I haven’t noticed any real file corruption yet, but the order of characters got jumbled earlier today, implying the character-list-order.txt was lost or reset. I do have daily backups of Interface&WTF, but unless I notice something like the character order, it’s difficult to compare them for data loss due to the amount of files which get altered every session anyway.

Windows 10
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor 3.60 GHz
2x16 GB RAM
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
SSD with WoW (not Windows): Crucial P3 Plus SSD 4TB M.2 PCIe Gen4 NVMe

chkdsk performed for both the Games/WoW SSD and the Windows SSD

2

What are the exact specs of your computer, especially your SSD?

3

Crucial P3 Plus SSD 4TB M.2 PCIe Gen4 NVMe

4

Ah, not Kingston SSD as I half suspected - some of those have had fairly common issues. Unfortunately I don’t have any real ideas what could cause - I’d chck Windows event viewer in case there are some error messages which shed some light.

5

Iv been disconnecting since January, found a work around and last night while aoe farming, disconnected again but this time my Battle.net fully lost connection and it even cut my internet out for like 15 seconds, brand new router I got this morning too

6

After starting this thread, I tried a session with Render Scale 33% and Graphics Quality turned down to 1, then a while with Render Scale back to 100% but Graphics Quality 4, then back to 10, haven’t noticed an issue yet.

Maybe the Config.wtf had some bad settings? Comparing the current one to a backup, the only thing that stands out is that TurnSpeed was present in the older file, set to 120.000008, not present in the newer Config - I did notice some weird turning about a week ago, turning via keyboard bindings was slower and more “sluggish” (the animation of head turning, then the rest of the body following was way slower)

Maybe it was that CVar being set, maybe it was the float value - if you find this while having the same issue, check your Config.wtf for TurnSpeed, and either remove that line, reset the file, or check whether altering graphics quality removes the line.