Conflict between Blender and Huion Windows driver
There is an issue where if Blender crashes, Blender is unable to reopen until you either exit TabletDriver.exe (e.g. in taskbar or Task Manager), temporarily rename System32/wintab32.dll or restart the computer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/blenderhelp/comments/ttgeji/comment/lg2cqk8/
It occurs anywhere from the latest Blender 4.4, to apparently as early as Blender 2.3 as one commenter who owns a Huion tablet said. Another user said it's been an issue for over 4 years now. It's only occurring on Huion tablets, not with any of your competitors. I personally use BForArtists 3.6.2 mostly (user-friendly fork of Blender) and it happens there too, where if it crashes, I often have to exit TabletDriver.exe to be able to reopen Blender.
Unfortunately I don't know how to simulate/force a crash of Blender, but that's what you have to do to reproduce this problem on Windows.
Maybe the easiest way is to crash it is to set render settings higher than the PC can handle using all RAM and forcibly ending the Blender process in Task Manager.
Uninstalling and reinstalling Blender or removing all Blender-related folders in %AppData% does not fix it.
Hopefully your developers can figure out a fix in the future.
Hi D Duke, thank you for bringing this to our attention. Could you kindly provide the following so we can have our engineers check on this further?
Best Regards,
HUION Customer Support
Windows 10 LTSC Enterprise 2021 (21H2)
PenTablet 12.4.2.181112
I noticed this conflict also sometimes prevents Cinema 4D from launching, as well as Cinema 4D's uninstaller program, not just Blender, and they only launched after I exited TabletDriver.exe.
The issue with the driver does not occur immediately, when I reopen TabletDriver.exe there is no issue launching these other programs, but after waiting some hours or days of uptime, the conflict sometimes arises. It's difficult to reproduce the problem. The driver is "accumulating" something over time, but it's not a memory leak because TabletDriver.exe remains under 2MB in Task Manager.
I am not the only one with this issue, there are several other people with the same issue that sometimes can't launch Blender or Cinema 4D when TabletDriver.exe is open. I don't think this issue existed before Windows 10. Perhaps this issue started with a newer Windows 10 build, maybe starting from 2018, 2019 or 2020, I don't think I saw anyone complain about this issue before then.
See the attached DeepSeek chat screenshot for more details, pass this information if you can.
Hi, D Duke. Thank you for providing the additional information. After consulting with our technical department, I regret to inform you that we no longer support our v12 drivers, as we have discontinued production of the models that utilize this driver version for some time now. Currently, the only models using v12 drivers are those with 2048 pen pressure levels.
The issue you are experiencing has already been resolved in our v15 drivers. However, I must inform you that v15 drivers only support models with 4096 and 8192 pen pressure levels. We recommend upgrading your tablet to take advantage of the v15 driver. You can visit our official online store at https://store.huion.com/ to check out the latest promotions.
Best Regards,
HUION Customer Support