imnotatryhur15f602ee
New member
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2026
- Messages
- 1
I found what appears to be a severe UDP socket leak in MSI.CentralServer.exe.
After MSI Center had been running for several days, UDP-based DNS resolution stopped working system-wide. TCP connectivity was still fine, DNS over TCP/53 worked, but normal DNS queries over UDP/53 timed out.
Further diagnostics showed that Windows could no longer allocate a new ephemeral UDP port. Creating a UDP socket succeeded, but binding it to 0.0.0.0:0 failed with:
WSAENOBUFS / NoBufferSpaceAvailable
The Windows dynamic UDP port range on the system was the default:
49152–65535 — 16,384 ports total.
Get-NetUDPEndpoint showed 16,415 UDP endpoints in total, of which 16,377 belonged to a single process:
MSI.CentralServer.exe
The process also had approximately 17,673 handles open.
The UDP endpoints occupied essentially the entire dynamic range, starting from port 49152 and continuing through it.
I then terminated only MSI.CentralServer.exe:
Stop-Process -Name "MSI.CentralServer" -Force
Immediately afterwards, without rebooting:
Some of the leaked endpoints had creation timestamps several days old, so this appears to accumulate gradually rather than happening immediately after MSI Center starts.
System:
It would be useful to know whether this socket leak is already known/fixed in newer versions, and which MSI Center component is responsible for creating these UDP endpoints.
After MSI Center had been running for several days, UDP-based DNS resolution stopped working system-wide. TCP connectivity was still fine, DNS over TCP/53 worked, but normal DNS queries over UDP/53 timed out.
Further diagnostics showed that Windows could no longer allocate a new ephemeral UDP port. Creating a UDP socket succeeded, but binding it to 0.0.0.0:0 failed with:
WSAENOBUFS / NoBufferSpaceAvailable
The Windows dynamic UDP port range on the system was the default:
49152–65535 — 16,384 ports total.
Get-NetUDPEndpoint showed 16,415 UDP endpoints in total, of which 16,377 belonged to a single process:
MSI.CentralServer.exe
The process also had approximately 17,673 handles open.
The UDP endpoints occupied essentially the entire dynamic range, starting from port 49152 and continuing through it.
I then terminated only MSI.CentralServer.exe:
Stop-Process -Name "MSI.CentralServer" -Force
Immediately afterwards, without rebooting:
- total UDP endpoints dropped from 16,415 to 40
- UDP DNS queries to 1.1.1.1 started working again
- UDP DNS queries to 8.8.8.8 started working again
- normal HTTPS requests started working normally again
Some of the leaked endpoints had creation timestamps several days old, so this appears to accumulate gradually rather than happening immediately after MSI Center starts.
System:
- Windows 10, build 19045
- MSI Center / MSI Center SDK installation had not been updated for quite some time
- MSI Center SDK shown in Installed Apps: 3.2026.0317.01
It would be useful to know whether this socket leak is already known/fixed in newer versions, and which MSI Center component is responsible for creating these UDP endpoints.
