False 'Controller disconnected' always ruins my split-screen co-op session

[ikantspelwurdz]

Every week or two I visit a friend who has Halo MCC. We are trying to beat Halo: CEA on legendary, one chapter per visit.

 

It went well at first, we made it to The Library without incident, but for the past four sessions, this has happened. In the middle of the mission, the game suddenly stops and says something like "Controller disconnected. Please reconnect your controller to continue. {A}->Continue."

 

Neither controller is disconnected. The lights on both are on, pressing Home on either controller brings up the system UI, and the controller can interact with it just fine. But the game thinks the controller is disconnected, and at this point in game, pressing A on either controller does nothing.

 

We have tried:

• Updating the controllers' firmware
• Turning off the controllers, turning them back on again
• Pulling the batteries out, putting them back in, turning the controllers back on again
• Plugging the controllers into the console via USB
• Replacing the batteries

None of that works. The message won't go away, and there's no way to resume. The game has to be reset, and since you can't save in co-op, our progress in the chapter is gone. Try again next week, hope it doesn't happen again (and four times in a row it has).

 

The system has two controllers and a Kinect. He has an MS profile, I use a guest account. This is the only game we play, so I don't know if this happens with other games or not.

 

Google searching for this problem has been fruitless. Nobody talks about co-op split-screen, only Internet multiplayer, and even then most of the threads I've found seem to be talking about actual controller disconnects, not wrong ones where the system responds just fine but the game doesn't.