Seeking insight about removing entries for a defunct Vid driver from Registry

[BonzaiDuck]

I just installed a faster nVidia AGP card in my two-year-old system. The old card was an ASUS V9980 nVidia 5950-Ultra. I had long-since stopped using the ASUS drivers in preference to the nVidia drivers available through the nVidia web site.

The new (to my system, anyway) LeadTek nVidia 7600GT card also came with its own driver disk, but I simply went directly to nVidia and downloaded the latest 91.47 driver update. I only had one problem there, for failure to disable my AV program before installing the drivers, so I reinstalled them.

However, looking back through the Windows "System" Event-Log, I see that the day I took the ASUS card from my machine and replaced it with the LeadTek -- the day I installed the LeadTek and the new nVidia drivers, the even-log began recording an error loading a service on bootup.

The error was due to the ANVIOCTL driver file, which I have now determined through a brief search of the web is an ASUS nVidia driver.

I've found several entries for this "ANVIOCTL" string in the system registry. I've run a registry cleanup with my System Mechanic (v6) twice today, but the error keeps showing up in the event-log.

How should I proceed to clean up these entries in the registry-editor? Which entries should I delete? Any and all recommendations will be appreciated.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Driver Cleaner

 

[Bozo Galora]

delete these

ANVIOCTL.SYS in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS

and

anvioctl.dll in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32

these are ASUS specific (ASUS nvidia in out control) that nv uninstall may not catch.

also search entire reigistry for same and delete

if not there (already uninstalled) then check startup and disable service - its trying to start but no drivers

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Both of your recommendations seem sound.

I found Driver Cleaner at DriverHeaven through a web search just after I posted this thread. There are a lot of hoops to go through -- they recommend disconnecting from my LAN and uninstalling the existing nVidia drivers.

I edited the registry before because Symantec (Norton) software leaves crap behind when you uninstall it. This approach needs careful attention, so it's a trade-off between the hoops in Driver Cleaner versus special care with this one.

There is perhaps another approach: Delete the ANVIOCTL (sys and dll) files from the Windows registry, and let System Mechanic do its thing. Apparently, SM only checks to see that files and registry entries match -- I'm thinking it doesn't validate whether the hardware and software match.

Thank you both very much, and wish me luck. I cannot stand seeing those red "error" items in my Event Viewer.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

These remarks may not be of use to anyone, but even so . . .

Best approach was to simply delete the ANVIOCTL entries from the registry.

Event viewer (system) -- all "blue."

Thanks again.