Force Device Manager to uninstal removed hardware?

[Nelson B]

I had a CNET PRO200 PCI 100BaseT ethernet card in my system.
It was installed and was working OK.
Then I removed it. It's no longer physically present.

But device manager refuses to uninstall the device(s) for it.

Device manager recognizes that the physical device cannot be found
anywhere on any bus, and has disabled the device. But when I try to
uninstall the logical device in device manager, Device Manager tells me
that the uninstall failed because the (long absent) device is required
to boot the system. Yeah, sure.

The manufacturer doesn't care. They care that when you ADD it to the
system, that it comes up and works. But uninstalling it is of no
interest to them. I'll never have another of their products in my system.

Any way I can forcibly remove it, uninstall it, from my system?

I suppose I could find all the driver files and remove them individually.
That might be a start, but it would leave turds in the registry.

(Please don't bother with telling me to wipe the drive and reinstall
Windows from scratch. That ain't gonna happen.)

Thanks.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

Try putting it physically back in and then uninstall the device via Device Manager. Also, if you had to install any drivers, or other software for it, remove that from Add/Remove Programs.

 

[S.Sengupta]

Reinstall and then uninstall that in Safe Mode.

regards,
S.Sengupta[MS-MVP]

 

[Plato]

I had a CNET PRO200 PCI 100BaseT ethernet card in my system.

Next time get a decent ethernet card.

 

[Nelson B]

Try putting it physically back in and then uninstall the device via Device
Manager. Also, if you had to install any drivers, or other software for it,
remove that from Add/Remove Programs.

I found an answer that works elsewhere, and thought I'd share it here.

It seems that for each installation of the card, there were TWO devices
in device manager. When the card was physically removed, one of the two
devices became invisible in device manager; the other remained visible.
The visible one couldn't be uninstalled until the invisible one was
uninstalled first. The invisible one couldn't be uninstalled because it
was invisible!

To make the invisible one visible again, I set an environment variable.
The advice for this was found in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315539/EN-US/

With that environment variable set, all the invisible devices appeared, and
I could uninstall them easily in device manager. Then I was able to also
uninstall the visible devices that depended on the invisible ones.

I cleaned out a lot of old devices that I've jettisoned over the years.
Box is much happier now. Start up is faster too.

Card's Tech Supt says this invisible device problem is Microsoft's fault.
That seems kinda hard to refute at the moment.

Anyway, my immediate problem is solved.