Firefox Has Been Blocked From Accessing Graphics Hardware

Been a lot of inconsistency with AMD drivers for a long time now, and their updates are extremely slow and still include the old ATI brand which is not a good sign. Anyway, after a lot of experience trying to get a Litecoin mining rig with six R9 290X's running I discovered a whacky fact is the Microsoft drivers are sometimes better in 8.1 than the current AMD production or beta drivers!

Although it seems lame to advise "check and update drivers" in my experience with AMD unless you have the lucky hardware combination which nobody knows 8-) it's the norm to constantly reinstall, remove all, try again, until it works. Here are some steps which may help:

1) Temporary = Go to the system advanced options and find the part where you choose how windows updates drivers, turn off automatic search and update of drivers.

2) Run the AMD express uninstall of all components. Do not reboot yet...

3) Delete the C:\AMD folder which contains a copy of the whole driver installation source (and all the previous versions - I wish they would clean this up it's really big and gets bigger each upgrade!).

4) In Device Manager, choose the menu option "View - Show Hidden Devices".

5) Expand all audio, video and display devices and manually uninstall all HDMI audio, ATI/AMD, etc... devices. If you skipped step #1 or #3 you will fail here because after a certain point it will start reinstalling them all again getting you in a real mess (half removed/half installed) then reboot and go back to #1.

6) Delete all ATI and AMD folders from both "C:\Program Files" and "C:\Program Files (x86)" if you have 64bit Windows. You should do with your hardware spec and for all those new memory hungry games. Would affect the driver issues too, could be more or less bugs in 64bit compared to 32bit.

7) Open REGEDIT and expand Local Machine\Current Control Set\Services then delete all service keys starting "ati..." or "amd...". Also check Local Machine\Software for any ATI or AMD keys and remove.

8) Now after the next reboot you have a clean system which will NOT auto load any drivers/start in SVGA "Microsoft Basic Video Adapter" driver mode.

From this point on, you can try different routes to get a stable system (repeat ALL the above steps again to properly reset and try again!!!). Various ideas are:

1) Turn auto driver update on and ONLY install the Microsoft update driver (and older but stable redistribution of the current production driver - dated December 6th 2013). It works much better than the repackaged and released AMD driver even when it's the same version (strange but true - and that's also how you get the sixth card working on a Litecoin rig!).

2) Turn auto driver update off and manually install the current production AMD driver.

3) Same as #2 but with the latest beta driver.

4) Use the "Refresh" OS option to basically reinstall Windows keeping your data and profile.

5) Perform an upgrade install (reinstall from Windows USB/DVD) which works better than refresh.

One of those should work. Other things which could be causing trouble are incompatible tuning utilities or Hypervisors which support 3D/graphics sharing (VMware workstation).

I'd have hoped this error message would have been documented somewhere properly (MSDN usually) so we could sort this out ourselves. Before assuming it's Microsoft's fault though I'd say AMD are taking way too long to stabilize their driver platform. I prefer AMD and will continue to buy them as long as they are ahead and good at super computing (crypto-currency mining) but I must say NVidia driver releases are both much more stable and very frequent.

Generally you want this auto driver install on because it just makes plug and play much better and not having it may cause some device installs to fail or install older incompatible drivers during their setup routine. But if you need to leave it off to stay working. Then complain on the AMD forums until you can work in normal/auto-update mode again.

Firefox Has Been Blocked From Accessing Graphics Hardware

Source: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-hardware/application-has-been-blocked-from-accessing/a7ea89c8-e15c-4d0f-a070-4b882e290614?auth=1