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I have an HP Zbook 15 running Windows 7 that I use at work and when I undock it the following programs have a tendency to crash:

  • Firefox
  • Skype for Business (Lync)
  • Any active VirtualBox virtual machines (but not the VirtualBox GUI itself)
  • VLC Media Player

Firefox doesn't always crash, but it generally does when Flash has been used. I think the common factor for these is that they use audio, but I'm not sure.

Does anyone have any experience with this, and possibly a resolution? Thanks.

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  • I have no Zbook, but similar problems occurred on Dell lattitude laptops and D series docks. The workaround for them was to put the laptop in sleep more before [un]docking.
    – Hennes
    Aug 11, 2016 at 12:05

4 Answers 4

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I see your post was ages ago, but I just found a work around for this issue on my Zbook today which uses a thunderboldt 3 docking station. I had same issue with outlook, Skype, and it seemed any office program would freeze when I undocked and stay frozen until I docked back up or restarted the programs. The work around I finally found was to keep my primary monitor as the laptop monitor. For some reason my PC had trouble using a desktop monitor as primary.

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  • Unfortunately I no longer have the laptop in question so I can't confirm that this works
    – Peter
    Apr 3, 2018 at 17:32
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I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 when undocking my laptop. It seems to be caused by the GPU switching to some kind of low power mode.

I fixed it by disabling the GPU hardware acceleration in Outlook. Which can be done in the options. File > Options > Advanced > scroll to Display > check 'Disable hardware graphics acceleration'

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  • I guess this is the right direction, but not really a solution
    – davidbaumann
    Apr 3, 2018 at 8:15
  • Unfortunately I no longer have the laptop in question so I can't confirm that this works
    – Peter
    Apr 3, 2018 at 17:32
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If your HP Zbook has a dedicated graphics card such as AMD or NVIDIA, try disabling it's (AMD or NVIDIA) graphics driver through the device manager. That worked for me.

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I had a similar issue with a Dell Latitude E7470 on Windows 10 with the following apps:

  • Outlook
  • OneNote
  • Toggl Desktop
  • AutoHotkey

Every time I would decouple my laptop from the AC adapter or dock, these applications would crash. It turned out to be related to the Task Scheduler.

All above applications were set (by me) to launch after a small delay at login. However, Task Scheduler has an option to stop a task when the computer switches to battery power:

Stop a task when switching to battery power grayed out

As it was grayed out I assumed this option would not be taken into account. Turned out I was wrong.

To uncheck the checkbox Stop if the computer switches to battery power I first had to check the box above it (related to AC power). Then, after unchecking the battery checkbox, I could uncheck the AC checkbox again and hit OK to save.

So a first troubleshooting step might be to check if your applications are launched by Task Scheduler and if it has the battery condition checked.

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