Valorant Vanguard Error Fix: VAN 9001, 9002, 9003, and 128

Vanguard errors are not game crashes. Nothing is broken — the anti-cheat has looked at your PC and decided it cannot prove the machine is trustworthy, so it refuses to start the game. That is why reinstalling Valorant does nothing for most VAN codes, and why the fix is almost always a Windows or BIOS setting.

The code tells you which check failed. Read it before you touch anything.

VAN 9001 — TPM 2.0 is missing or off

On Windows 11 this is the most common Vanguard block. Vanguard requires TPM 2.0 and it must be both present and enabled.

Check it first: press Win + R, run tpm.msc, and confirm the status is ready for use and the specification version says 2.0. If Windows cannot find a TPM at all, it is disabled in firmware, not absent.

Enable it in the BIOS. On Intel boards the setting is usually called PTT (Platform Trust Technology); on AMD boards it is fTPM. Both typically live under an Advanced or Security tab. Save, boot back into Windows, and re-run tpm.msc.

One warning worth taking seriously: enabling TPM or Secure Boot does not delete your files, but changing the boot mode or converting a disk can break booting if done carelessly. If BitLocker is on, save your recovery key before you enter the BIOS.

VAN 9002 — Control Flow Guard is off

This one is not about your motherboard. VAN 9002 means Control Flow Guard (CFG) is not active, which in practice means Windows Exploit Protection has been altered — usually by a per-app exception someone added to “help” a game run.

Open Windows Security, go to App & browser control → Exploit protection → Program settings, and look for any entry mentioning Riot Games, Riot Vanguard, or Valorant. Remove those entries so the system defaults apply again, then restart.

If the list is clean, reset Exploit Protection to its Windows defaults. Do not disable CFG as a workaround — that is the exact state Vanguard is refusing to accept.

VAN 9003 — Secure Boot is disabled

Windows 11 requires Secure Boot as well, and 9003 means it is off. Run msinfo32 and check two lines: BIOS Mode should say UEFI, and Secure Boot State should say On.

If BIOS Mode says Legacy, Secure Boot cannot work until the firmware is switched to UEFI — and a drive installed in MBR mode may need conversion to GPT first. Back up before attempting that.

If it already says UEFI but Secure Boot is off, enable it in the BIOS and, if the option exists, restore the default Secure Boot keys before saving.

VAN 128 and VAN 135 — something else is running

These two are conflicts, not configuration errors. VAN 128 means another program or service is interfering with Vanguard; VAN 135 is usually third-party software, with overlays and tuning tools named most often.

The correct tool here is a clean boot: run msconfig, open the Services tab, hide Microsoft services, disable the rest, and restart. If Valorant launches, re-enable services in halves until it breaks again — that identifies the culprit in a few restarts instead of guessing. Overlays and hardware monitoring utilities are the usual suspects.

“We couldn’t install a required dependency”

If the installer fails with that exact message, the cause is almost always a pending Windows update. Install everything Windows Update offers, restart, then run the official installer as administrator.

For a full reset, uninstall both Valorant and Riot Vanguard, restart, and verify the vgc service exists in services.msc with its startup type set to Automatic. If Vanguard will not uninstall normally, an elevated command prompt can remove the services with sc delete vgc and sc delete vgk before reinstalling from the Riot Client.

Codes you cannot fix yourself

Two codes are worth recognising so you stop troubleshooting. VAN 138 means the game detected a virtual machine — cloud PCs and VMs are not supported, regardless of performance. VAN 152 is a hardware ban; there is no local fix, only a support ticket.

For codes like VAN 0, 6, and 1067, work through the same order: Windows updates, vgc set to Automatic, reinstall Vanguard, clean boot. If you are on console instead, none of this applies — see the console guide for how that version is locked down differently.

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