Force uninstall wrong driver in XP Home?

[km]

A friend of mine has an XP Home machine that until now has been used
for dial-up internet access. However now he has cable but can't get the
onboard NIC on his VIA kt266a motherboard working. The reason is
another network card is being detected, a Broadcom 4211 iLine10. He
does not have this hardware on his computer.

I went over to his house and tried to uninstall the driver. I got a
message saying this driver may be necessary to boot the computer and it
wouldn't let me uninstall it. The driver goes away but then comes back
on reboot. I even tried disabling the onboard NIC in the BIOS and
installing a 8139 chipset Realtec card. The card is detected (as was
the onboard VIA NIC) but it also will not work because of the phantom
Broadcom NIC.

I came across this kind of thing once on a w2k box and I just "updated"
the driver to a serial port driver, rebooted, and was able to remove
the driver completely. However XP will not let me change the driver
type.

Is there some way to make this stupid driver go away once and for all??

 

[Thota Umesh]

try this : update driver > search manual > have disk > place the drivers of
ur installation disk

 

[Mike Hall - MS MVP Windows Shell/User]

A Broadcom 4211 is an analogue modem, the dialup kind.. if it is still
physically installed in the computer, it will be picked up and installed..

Your friend will do well to contact his ISP if he is having problems
connecting to the internet..

 

[PaulM]

Read this:
http://www.modemsite.com/56k/bcm.asp