Deleting ENUM entries in registry

[videobruce]

Device drivers that are uninstalled still leave entries in the registry under ENUM which I believe are Device Manager entries that can't be deleted. If I have a problem with a driver I like to completely uninstall it and start from scratch, but I can't since these entries are permanently entered into the registry with no apparent way to remove them. I have encountered times where that causes problems since the driver is really already there and no conformation boxes appear when you go to reinstalled them they way they did when they wereinstalled the first time. Especially with video devices where it is more critical.

Without reinstalling a previous image file (if there is one), how can these entries be deleted? I use Registry Crawler to find these left over entries of which there usually are many. This is running 2k w/sp3 and logged in as a administartor.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Boot into safe mode. Device Manager usually shows all the entries for any device that has an ENUM registry entry. You can also just manually delete them from the Registry, they aren't "permanent", the removal from Device Manager just isn't as complete as it ought to be.

However the issue of drivers already being on the system and it therefore not asking you for drivers when you delete and then reinstall a device is not related to that. Once you've installed drivers, they are copied to certain directories like windows\system32 and windows\system32\drivers. When Windows detects a new device, it first checks there, and if the driver exists, then it doesn't ask you for drivers.

Before you delete a device in Device Manager, look at the Drivers tab in its properties, and make a list of them. Then after you remove the device, you should be able to move those drivers to another folder or rename them (add .OLD as an extension); you might have to go into Safe Mode to do that if Windows considers them still in use. You rename or move them rather than deleting them in case one of the files is actually used by other devices.

The next time you boot, Windows will ask for the drivers for the device.

 

[videobruce]

Will going into Safe Mode (something I have rarely done in 2k as oppose to 98SE/ME) show mode devices than a normal boot if 'show hidden devices' is checked?

How about using Reg Edit 32 instead of Device Manager?

 

[Lord Evermore]

The "hidden devices" seem to be devices that are inactive but still present (WAN miniport drivers for VPN for example) or devices that are really not devices but Windows looks at them as, like the "beep" service. It won't show devices that were installed then removed. When you boot to safe mode, Device Manager shows all devices that it's got listed that were removed from the system but not uninstalled in Device Manager. So if you have a network card installed and pulled it out, DM would stop showing it normally, but still have the entry for it as a device (not loading any drivers for it though) and show it when you're in Safe Mode.

But as I mentioned, removing the extraneous entries isn't going to fix your problem. You need to remove the old driver files from the system directories so that Windows can't find them, and it will prompt you for drivers again. (And don't just delete them in case you need to restore a file that shouldn't have been moved.)

You can use Regedit or Regedit32 to manually remove all the ENUM entries, but you may end up accidentally removing entries for current devices, so it's better to just use Device Manager if you insist on bothering with it.

 

[videobruce]

When I first started using 2k I noticed that going into safe mode unlike 98SE/ME in Device Manager didn't list previous devices that were removed as either still being there or duplicate entries when you would install, then remove a driver or device and then reinstall that same device again. Same with CD drives that would show more than once for the same device.
I will have to look closer at DM in Safe Mode (something I have rarely used with 2k since I almost never need it!).