I ran into a very obscure almost malwareish type problem with Corsair’s iCue software. Even their own support could not figure out what was causing my computer to shut itself down upon starting icue.exe.
I noticed my computer randomly turning off one day.
I went into Event Viewer and started looking at the System logs. I saw an event that was caused by icue.exe to shut down my computer.
I started investigating the issue more and found that upon starting icue.exe, iCue would open, and then briefly, there’d be a warning message about a sensor over its threshold and immediately my computer would start the shutdown process.
In order to have a normal working computer I would have to log in, open Task Manager, go to Details, search for icue.exe and then kill the icue.exe process before it could sense a false reading of the Corsair QX120 sensor #3.
I had a feeling that there was a configuration file within one of the various iCue folders, but I didn’t know which one. There were many and I didn’t have time to scour through each and every folder looking for the right one. That was, until it pissed me off so much that Corsair’s support couldn’t even figure out what the problem or where the file was.
They continued to insist that if I just did a clean install of iCue that this problem would magically go away. They were wrong. Even after doing a clean install of iCue software, the problem returns immediately. I’m not even sure how the sensor is enabled with a clean install of the iCue software.
In any case, if you run into this issue and you’re seeing a piece of malware like icue.exe shutting down your computer due to a false reading of a sensor from one of the QX series fans, you want to go to %appdata%, Corsair, CUE5, profiles, open up the larger config file, mine was around 315KB, do a search for the text “Emergency Shutdown.”
Under the Emergency Shutdown entry you will see the shutdownPCEnabled option, as well as the shutdown PCTemperature option.
I changed the shutdownPCEnabled to false, and the shutdownPCTemperature to 150 because I KNEW it was a false reading. BEFORE YOU DO THIS, MAKE SURE YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT REALLY OVERHEATING! IF YOUR COMPUTER IS ACTUALLY OVERHEATING THEN ICUE IS DOING ITS JOB OF SAVING YOUR COMPUTER! READ YOUR TEMPS VIA HWINFO32 OR OTHER VARIOUS PIECES OF SOFTWARE TO ENSURE YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT OVERHEATING. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU DISABLE THIS AND YOUR COMPUTER OVERHEATS AND CAUSES ANY ISSUES!