USB Laptop Dock randomly disconnecting

I ran into an issue with my work laptop recently which was quite bizarre, when docked to my USB-C laptop dock all of a sudden the keyboard and mouse would disconnect. At random times the LEDs on my devices would drop out for about 3 seconds before coming alive again. The worst thing is that it tended to happen when I was joined to a video call, so a drop of my headset audio and webcam feed.

My laptop connects to the dock with a single USB and also supplies the video signal to my main external monitor, strangely though the video USB-C DisplayPort Alt Mode signal actually remained and didn’t drop out while the rest did.

I thought initially it was the powered USB hub connected to the dock - it wasn’t this. Then I thought it was the dock itself, later discovering that was also not the case. The next logical step for me was Googling and a suggestion about power management on the USB ports, maybe the power mode on the USB-C connection was dropping when the laptop was idling a bit. Checking the event log I could see some errors but not any that gave away the solution.

Root Cause

The solution turned out to be a problem with HyperX Ingenuity, which is the software utility for my mechanical keyboard. The latest version had a bug which caused something with .Net in Windows to become unhappy and resulting in the disconnection. After uninstalling the app and rebooting I was back to normal and not able to reproduce again.