Qualcomm Atheros QCA61x4A crashing on disconnect from WiFi or upon connecting to a VPN

ThomasM · January 2020

The Problem

I've been using a Predator Helios 300 laptop (part no NH.Q28AA.001) for a while now. Sometime, possibly when I began playing around with VPN services (although I believe it only became noticeable with the 2020 Windows 10 update), it developed a series of problems I tracked down to the Qualcomm Atheros QCA61x4A wireless network adapter drivers.
Firstly, whenever I either connect to a VPN or attempt to disconnect from WiFi, there is a good 50% chance the adapter will go completely offline, and I mean the adapter itself, not the laptop. Network and Internet Settings, when opened, never actually loads, and attempting to list networks to connect to causes the screen to load forever without anything coming up. The same thing happens when attempting to update, change, or disable the drivers (see What I've Tried below).
Furthermore, every time I attempt to shut down my computer after this, after waiting about 15 minutes, I experience a Blue Screen, giving the error DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE. Using WinDbg to debug this blue screen yields a bit more info:

The IMAGE_NAME is pci.sys (which I assume has something to do with plug-and-play), and going further, what I believe to be the culprit is revealed.

What I've Tried

Attempting to update, change, or disable the Qualcomm drivers in any way takes about ten minutes before it fails with the error,
"The Operation timed out waiting for this device to coomplete a PnP query-remove request due to a potential hang in the device stack of a related device. The system may need to be rebooted to complete this operation." It should be noted that, upon reboot, the drivers for the adapter will show to be whatever drivers I'd attempted to update them to.
Confirming that it seemed to be the Qualcomm driver that was causing the problem, I tried updating mine to different versions from various sources (Device Manager, Microsoft Update, Acer), I've found about 5 different Qualcomm Atheros drivers:

The Acer driver found online, Wireles LAN_Atheros_12.0.0.312_W10x64_(NFA344A HAI)
The Microsoft-provided Atheros driver (Device Manager options)
Two separate, but undifferentiated Atheros drivers (Device Manager options)
One driver from Windows Update containing a late 2019 version of the driver (the newest one I found)

I can be more specific with the versions if necessary, but none of these drivers seemed to work. Some had worse problems (now, my internet will now experience random lag spikes lasting 1-2 seconds, VPN or no), some worked alright, but none have fixed the issue.
Restarting the computer barely helps. Because it takes over 15 minutes to shut down gracefully, and it just blue screens out anyways, the only reasonable way I currently have of restarting my computer is just hard rebooting it, which I'm sure will corrupt something eventually if I have to keep doing it. Then, because this seems to happen randomly, sometimes when my computer restarts (with or without the VPN connecting), the device will crash and I'll have to restart it again if I want to use the internet.
I could well be wrong, but I don't currently believe this is caused solely by the VPN. As part of my attempt to fix this issue, I uninstalled it entirely (I'm using the NordVPN app), and the issue still happened at least once.
From my extremely limited experience with drivers, it looks like somehow, doing certain things like disconnecting cause the driver to enter some sort of "stuck" state in which it doesn't respond to any commands from the OS.
As a last bit of info, this might have to do with the new 2020 Windows 10 updates. That's the first time I noticed the blue screen issue, when I tried to restart my computer after the updates and it crashed (I managed to repair things with a chkdsk, I believe).

Computer Info
Predator Helios 300, about 2 years old, part no NH.Q28AA.001
Windows 10 (version 1909)
Recent Updates: 2020-01 Cumulative Update for .NET Framework/2020-01 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1909 (I have not yet tried reverting these updates)

Frankly, I'm at my wit's end. My living situation at the moment means I can't use Ethernet, and I've had a bad experience with wireless dongles in the past, so I hesitate to resort to another external network card. Does anyone have any idea how I might resolve this, or does it look like it's just faulty hardware? I would send it in for warranty support, but that expired two months ago, and I've already had to send it in once for a broken fan.
Does anyone have any ideas/suggestions?
Sorry if this is the wrong section; I thought since the problem seemed to be driver-related, it would fit with software and windows 10. I can repost this in the Predator forum if that would be more appropriate.