I'm going to repost this here because it's been up for weeks in the WIN OS10 forum and I didn't get a single reply and technically, it was working until a MSFS crash to restart. Here's the original post. I'm really at a loss of what to do. 

I had been flying all day and was going to cook dinner and be with the kid and wife for dinner, so I turned off my computer. Came back afterward and booted up machine as always. Everything is fine. I boot up MSFS and it completely crashes my system. This never happens. I've been lucky up until now to not be plagued with a ton of CTD's, but this made my entire system crash and prompt a restart. Anyways, I though: "no big deal" and let the machine reboot. First I noticed my bluetooth mouse wasn't working and my speakers weren't connecting. Long story short, it now says that I don't even have blueooth installed on this machine, when I was using it a couple hours before. I've gone through the various websites and troubleshooting, but nothing appears to fix the issue and I'm completely stumped. I re downloaded my MoBo wifi+bluetooth drivers, done all the device manager "tricks", but it's as if MSFS wiped away my OS realizing that I do in fact, have bluetooth hardware in my machine. Any help would be greatly appreciated. And thank you!

I would wager a hardware issue with your Bluetooth adapter is what caused MSFS to crash, not the other way around. MSFS used to CTD when Bluetooth devices went to sleep, so the adapter flaking out would most likely cause a CTD or BSOD as well. I've had a bluetooth adapter fail on a laptop before, so it is definitely a possibility.

I'm guessing the bluetooth/wifi is integrated into your motherboard? If you haven't already, completely cut the power to your system (including the power cord) for a few minutes. When you start back up, check the BIOS to ensure bluetooth/wifi are both enabled. It may even be beneficial to do a BIOS update and reset the BIOS to defaults just to rule out a BIOS issue. If it's a removable card (I know laptops are like this), you can try removing and re-seating the card on the motherboard. Your motherboard manual should have the location of the adapter. Last question, do you see your bluetooth adapter in the Windows device manager? If it's not listed here, it's very likely the bluetooth chip failed and is no longer detected by your computer. If it is detected, you can try forcefully removing the bluetooth drivers as described below and then reinstalling. If it has an exclamation point, you can double-click to check the status... this can also indicate a hardware failure.

If all of that fails and your system is out of warranty, the easiest solution is to get a $15 bluetooth USB dongle from Amazon. Bluetooth 5.3 is the latest standard, which will future proof you for the latest features in new bluetooth devices. Uninstall your motherboard's bluetooth drivers (you can also use the utility Driver Store Explorer to forcefully delete them, they will show up in the Driver Class column as "Bluetooth"), then install the USB adapter and you should be back in the game!

Hopefully this is helpful... I've gone through a few of the dongles as well, sometimes they just stop working for no reason or begin to have issues dropping devices.

Edit: it's probably too late now, but the Windows event viewer may have shown what happened just before your system restarted. If you were lucky and the machine made a memory dump before it restarted, Microsoft has a debugging tool in the Windows Store called WinDbg that can analyze the crash dump... this post will be helpful if you want to dig into that rabbit hole!)

Edited February 18, 20233 yr by Funky D

Hello,

 Download a linux Iso, plasma or xfce, write it on a usb key, boot it.
Check bluetooth is working.
Answer YES : problem with windows, chkdsk, sfc /scannow, etc as usual in case of problems
Answer No : hardware problem, check bios settings first.

It sounds to me that the original crash has corrupted some files in Windows 10.  Have you run through the 'Troubleshoot'/'Fix-it-now' routines within the Security & Updates part of Windows settings?

It's unlikely MSFS has killed your bluetooth, its more likely that whatever made your bluetooth disappear also crashed MSFS. MSFS doesn't like hardware changes while it is running although its less of a problem then in the early days.

I'd recommend checking Windows for corruption. There are a couple of tools you can use. To run them you will have to start a command prompt with admin rights.
In that command prompt type:

sfc /scannow

This will scan Windows for missing or damaged system files and repair/replace them if possible. 

Dism is an alternative and more powerfull alternative:
Use the following command for scanning for issues

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth

If it shows there are issues you can try to repair those with

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

 

Thank you ALL so, so much. Promising stuff here. I've got wife+kid fun stuff to do today, so I likely won't be able to go through these until tonight but I think somewhere here, you guys have given me a fix. Thanks again.