Bluetooth stops working exactly every 24hrs

At exactly 19:07 each night my Bluetooth suddenly stops working. A look in the Event Viewer reveals the following:

The local Bluetooth adapter has failed in an undetermined manner and will not be used. The driver has been unloaded.

Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)

When this occurs, the Bluetooth adapter shows up in Device Manager as an unknown USB device.

The first time this problem happened I had to reboot the computer, then reinstall the Bluetooth drivers and do a couple of reboots. When it happened last night, just a single reboot on its owned resolved it.

I have installed the latest adapter drivers from the manufacturer and updated the BIOS to the latest version. Windows Update is showing everything as up to date.

What is so strange about this is that it happens at exactly the same time each night. I looked in Task Scheduler but cannot see anything that would trigger it at that time. My antivirus logs show no scan or activity for that time.

Curiously, recently I had some mystery Windows Updates downloaded and installed but they are not showing up in my Windows Update History. Therefore I have no idea what they did.

My laptop is running Windows 10 Home version 1803
Bluetooth adapter is Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377

Any thoughts on what might be causing this Bluetooth issue?

As it's failing consistently at a specific time each night, you may wish to have a look at Sysinternals/Technet's Process Monitor.

The 'pros' are that ProcMon logs just about everything happening, whether it's process-, registry-, file- or network-related. The 'cons' are that the recorded trace logs are huge and there's a learning curve to using it. Basically, you need to learn how to filter events to narrow down the cause.

Have a look at this Defrag Tools: #3 - Process Monitor video which takes you on a tour of ProcMon's features. A second video - Defrag Tools: #4 - Process Monitor - Examples - shows ProcMon being used to investigate/troubleshoot and is also very useful to see how to narrow down your searches for possible culprits.

Try this:

1. Download the ProcessMonitor.zip file then extract the contents. (Procmon.exe is portable so you can store it where you want. For example, I always create a C:\Support folder to store portable utilities.)

2. Create a desktop shortcut that points to Procmon.exe and append -NoConnect.


This is important because ProcMon captures thousands of events per second and, by default, starts capturing the moment you run it.

3. In the shortcut's Properties, click on the Advanced... button then put a tick in the Run as administrator checkbox. Click on the OK button to close the dialog then on the Apply and OK buttons to record the changes and dismiss the Properties dialog.

4. Double-click ProcMon's shortcut, click Yes on the UAC prompt then accept the EULA. (You'll only see the EULA once.)

5. Once ProcMon opens you'll see the following menu/toolbar combo:


6. The most important icon is the third from the left, the Capture toggle (and its keyboard shortcut to start/stop the capture) shown as a below:

(b shows the icon used to clear results)

To test, use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+E to start a capture, count to 2 seconds then use CTRL+E to end the capture. This will give you an idea of how many events ProcMon captures per second. After you've had a look through the captured events, use CTRL+X to clear the results.

The 5 right-most icons are for 'gross' filtering. I never use the farmost right icon (Show Profiling Events) but the other 4 are useful to toggle on and off to filter specific activity.

For example, it's unlikely that your issue is caused by registry activity (unless it's a BUFFER OVERFLOW) so you could toggle the Show Registry Activity icon off and concentrate on the other areas.

I guess you're looking in the Result column for anything that isn't a SUCCESS... so you could right-click on one of the instances of SUCCESS and choose Exclude 'SUCCESS' from the context menu.


Similarly, you can use the Exclude Events Before and Exclude Events After to further narrow the results. It's all about filtering down to zero in on the likely cause of the failure.

Hope this helps...

Hi Rick. Many thanks for the recommendation for ProcMon and the advice on how to use it. Its sod's law that after posting this question on here, the Bluetooth problem hasn't occurred over the last two nights. Hopefully it will stay that way! That being said, ProcMon is a useful tool to know about and I expect it will come in handy in the future.